Masala Games' Shalin Shodhan on Detective Dotson, 'juice' and more
Shalin spoke to The Qun about a whole bunch of things ahead of tonight's appearance at the Future Games Show
“I like to tell people that [CD Projekt Red] know me and so they put that as a shoutout,” says Masala Games founder Shalin Shodhan about whether his studio is related to the Masala Studios that appears in Cyberpunk 2077, before swiftly adding, “But no, we have nothing to do with that.” This is a good way to describe the sort of tongue-in-cheek stuff that you’ll find littered across the length and breadth of Detective Dotson.
At this stage, you may well ask who or what Detective Dotson is. Well, first, it’s an upcoming game by Masala Games. It is described in its promotional content as “[a] story-driven adventure game set in modern-day India. Meet colourful characters and use disguises to get information. Explore the richly detailed streets of India to collect clues and complete the evidence board. Solve cases as Dotson — the reluctant detective who wants to be a Bollywood star!” Second, the link at the very end of the paragraph above will take you to the game’s Steam page that includes a playable demo. And third, it’s the only Indian game that will be featured at tonight’s Future Games Show. You can check it out for yourselves right here in a few hours.
The crime scene
Now in case you’re still in the dark about the game, Shalin is on hand to break it all down for us as part of a brief discussion. “Detective Dodson is a light-hearted adventure game set in modern modern-day India. It's pretty much like any adventure game. You explore, you talk to people, you find clues, and you solve an evidence board,” he says, noting that the key differentiator here is that it’s based in modern-day India.
“This,” he continues, “is an unexplored, underrepresented and nearly missing setting from games culture. We saw the opportunity and wanted to make something amazing in that space.” In this setting, you play as the eponymous detective, piecing together clues that you have to place logically on an evidence board so that the whole picture makes sense. The completion of one case sees you take on another and so — with every case pulling you deeper into the broader story.
Having played the demo (something I’m pleased to report I was able to do rather comfortably on my M1 MacBook Air), what stood out most to me was the art style. While the gameplay, quirky NPCs and humour — something I’d hinted at above — were a lot of fun, I felt it was the visual presentation that stole the show. “We took a long time to actually nail the pixel art characters,” Shalin says, adding that he always wanted the characters to be depicted in this manner.
Why? “A few reasons,” he replies, “One, I wanted them to be loveable, endearing and cute. And I feel like that's the representation I wanted to give to the Indian people in our game. Two, if you have pixel characters, you can make a lot of them on the screen. I knew that we have to have a pretty crowded game, because India is a crowded place. It was also very practical because doing crowds of 3D characters would be a bit of a pain. So it fit the bill nicely there.”
Shifting from the foreground to the background, Shalin adds, “Once we cracked the style, one of the first experiments we did was to put our pixel characters on a photograph — just a photograph of somewhere in India. And it looked amazing!” This, it would seem, was the eureka moment for the Masala Games team because it was a look they hadn’t seen before. And it was then that they decided that India would have to be realistic, while the characters would have to be very pixel art and cartoony.
“And then somebody from the US (whom we don't know) is just randomly streaming the game and says, ‘Oh, it looks like Indian South Park’,” he says, “That's a great analogy because one, I love South Park. And two, drawing that analogy is great, because when you introduce something new to someone, you want to meet them with something familiar. You don't want to give them something so new that they're like, ‘I don't know what I'm looking at’. So for them to make those associations means that we succeed universally.”
The motive
The playable demo, to which allusion had been drawn above, isn’t especially long, but it does a decent job in establishing certain parameters — key gameplay mechanics, look and feel, the setting, the characters and the sort of story you’ll be experiencing. It also sports a variety of Detective Dotson’s influences and inspirations, though not always on the sleeve. “Recently, there was a game called The Case of the Golden Idol that has a really cool mechanic — you have a sentence, but the nouns are missing and you need to locate them by exploring static scenes. That was a real inspiration. Games like Papers, Please and and stuff like that are also really inspiring to us,” Shalin says.
In terms of the approach to art design, he names Amanita Design, the studio behind the point-and-click game Machinarium. “If you look at their environments, they’re hyper real and very detailed. They’re almost collage-like photographs,” Shalin explains, “They don’t do pixel art characters, but those environments always seem hyper real, mysterious and fun to explore.” The game was a major inspiration for Masala Games when it came to rendering the environments in 3D. “We wanted to give the feel that there’s a lot going on, a lot the player isn’t seeing, and so [creating a desire] to get lost in the environment.”
Beyond games, inspiration for Detective Dotson came from a whole lot of different sources. “A lot of Indian media [inspired the game], because we want to represent the ‘it happens only in India’ story. That meant a lot of things from TV shows and movies, obviously Bollywood included, went into the game. We totally want to have monologues with God, singing and dancing, and all the other tropes we want to celebrate. Indian TV shows like CID are also an inspiration to us,” he elaborates.
And all of these inspirations and tropes combined with the gameplay have unsurprisingly gone down quite well with gamers. “Indian streamers who play the game always say it feels like a summer vacation, because they get a very warm, fuzzy and cosy feel from the game,” the Masala Games founder says, adding, “As for the international streamers, the nice part is that everybody’s immediately accepted the game. Nobody’s been like, ‘Oh, I don’t know if this is for me’, because the gameplay seems familiar to them and then there are all the little things that they get a chuckle out of.”
There’s a part of the game — and demonstrated in the demo — that allows you to hurl carelessly-discarded garbage right back at the litterbug in question. “And if you do that, you get some coins and that cracks everybody up,” says Shalin, “For us, that’s important because we want to give a message without being preachy or anything, we want to give a fun little message about cleanliness.” Additionally, the feedback received by the team seems to indicate that the evidence board system as a core gameplay mechanic is being widely enjoyed.
“There’s been universal appreciation of the music, and the environment. So the feel of Detectice Dotson is being liked quite a bit,” he continues, “There are some cute pets and stuff in the game. There are some twists that are a bit shocking — so the reactions are always interesting. They’re not always positive because people do feel that the twists may have been a bit of a jump. But it's important for us to keep the thrill in the game, not make it completely safe, but have a bit of danger — it’s a detective game after all.”
The prime suspect
A veteran of the film and gaming industries for around 20 years, Shalin’s journey has seen him involved with all sorts of projects, even picking up a few Academy Awards along the way. “I was in the US for 11 years where I got to work at Electronic Arts. I was at a studio called Maxis, where they made the game Spore. I was on that team from when it was 10 people all the way till we shipped, when it was 150 people,” he recalls.
After four years on the life simulation real-time strategy god game, it was time to make a move. Shalin says, “Then I got to work at Pixar Animation Studios, where I spent around five years and got to work on six films from Toy Story 3 to Finding Dory. I had an incredible experience just learning tonnes and tonnes there.” It was finally in 2014 that he returned to India. “My wife and I wanted to raise our children here. and we moved back to get some family support,” he adds.
Over time, Shalin began to build a team, initially to do services (see examples here). “And we did services for a good chunk of time. We established a very stable team of talented people. And about a year-and-a-half or maybe two years ago, we said, ‘Hey, we have a lot of ideas, and should make some of our own stuff’. And that's when Detective Dotson began,” he says. But that doesn’t mean the team’s turned its back on services.
“Services keeps the lights on for us,” he admits, “I will say we've been very, very lucky with the clients we've had. It's a little different. We position ourselves as a studio that solves hard problem for people or when people want really high quality of work. They come to us. We don't do fast and cheap work. Most of our clients come through my connections. And so they give us free reign to make whatever it is that we're making for them. And we have a lot of freedom. So we get to exercise our creative muscles there too.”
Somewhere along the way, Masala Games came into being. “I was making a game on the side when I was in the US, and being an immigrant and whatnot, I couldn't publish it from there,” he reveals, “So Masala Games was originally formed in 2012 to publish this iOS game that I had solo-developed. It's called Word Mess, and was a word game that I had launched in 2012. That's when Masala Games had been incorporated. Our first hire was made in 2017, so that's when it truly became a company.”
The motive
Among the most fascinating things about speaking with people who develop games, learning about their own distinct methods sits at the very top. And so naturally, I had to enquire about Shalin’s approach. What comes first, the gameplay, the characters, the setting? “For me, I always imagine what if my game was already made and someone was playing it; what are they feeling in that moment?” he asks, “It always comes from thinking about the audience and the emotions that I want to invoke in them, and working backwards from there. So everything else is, to me, is in service of that.”
One of the biggest aspects of the emotions Shalin seeks to elicit is delight and a bit part of that is-… well, I’ll just let him explain it in his own words. “I always want to have plenty of, pardon my French, but expectation-fuckery, just to give a lot of delight,” says Shalin, spelling it out a bit more, “For instance, people think [and expect] it's going to be one thing, but it's a whole other thing. I want a lot of those wow moments. And I also want a lot of juice in my interactions.”
Juice? “Yeah, in the simplest terms, what it means is you do a small action, but it has a lot of cascading reaction from the game,” he explains, “And any time that formula is positive, you're going to get a lot of juice. So you do one thing and a lot happens as a result of you doing a small action — that's going to give you the feeling of something is juicy.”
“Modern-day India is an unexplored, underrepresented and nearly missing setting from games culture. We saw the opportunity and wanted to make something amazing in that space”
Staying on juice, Shalin says, “I can't claim to have coined the term ‘juice’, but I think I can claim to have given it a lot of prominence. When I was in grad school and also in the early days of my career, I did a lot of work on what juicy gameplay means and promoting the term ‘juice’ amongst the design community and stuff like that. So for me, it's very important that the game is juicy and that there's a lot of wow moments that ultimately create delight for the player.”
Closing the case?
“We definitely want to keep making cases even after we launch, because there’s so much to do. Once we invest in making the world, there’s just so much exploration, characters and stories we can build in,” says Shalin about future plans for Detective Dotson, “We want to service the game with at least one or two quarters worth of content, assuming there’s interest. We’ll probably do one or two quarters worth anyway, and after that it depends on how people are receiving it.”
And what about life beyond Detective Dotson? “We’ve invested a lot in creating this 3D India and whole set of characters, more importantly building the pipeline that allows us to put out episodic content,” he points out, “First of all, I would love to keep servicing Detective Dotson and making lots of content. There’s so many stories to be told in that world, but I would also love if this approach enables us to create a whole bunch of other IPs using the material that we have.”
A Telltale Tool type game engine that allows developers to spin off multiple different ideas comes to mind, but Shalin has something slightly different in mind. “For example, a game about driving through Indian traffic,” he offers, “I’d also love to make a visual novel type game about arranged marriage in the same style that we use for Detective Dotson.”
But wait, there’s more. “There is just so much that we could explore and so many game mechanics that we have within our culture,” says the film and game veteran, “For example, if you take dahi handi during Janmashtami, that’s a tower-building game. You could get all sorts of characters involved and make it really fun. There are so many game mechanics and story ideas within the world around us if you really go looking. Now that we’ve done the hard part of building the basic art work and infra, there’s a more lot that can be done.”
We look forward to seeing how it all shakes out. For now, all eyes will be on tonight’s big reveal at the Future Games Show, and in case you missed it the first time, here’s that link again. And do go check out that demo.