Roto, a game that its student devs describe as “A Simple Game About Big Balls” has nothing to do with ‘balls’ in the literal sense, or so we assume.
Roto came into being as a product of a 24-hour game making competition. The game, made for web browsers was looking good. Obviously it wasn’t in its most polished state at the day long competition, and the people who played it enjoyed it. So the handful of bourgeoning developers kept working on it post the competition, and community feedback was looking good.
An alpha build of Roto was submitted to the Indian Creative Technology Awards 2014, where it got nominated for two categories: “Excellence in Browser Gaming” and “Excellence in Mobile Gaming.” Results are still due.
Lucid Labs?
When the winners of the competition were announced months later, much to the students’ surprise, it was Roto that had won the “Honorable Mention” award which came with a $1000 (INR 60,000) cash prize. The cash prize proved a motivating factor and a small indie team was formed, who now call themselves Lucid Labs.
Ever since, Lucid Labs has been pushing to complete an Android build for Roto, which is now up for commercial release by May 2014. A final date isn’t out yet, but developer Chirag Chopra is confident about their product and has also teased an iOS version to be released after Android. “The game will be released on Android by May 2014 and shortly after that, we’ll be releasing it to iOS. We haven’t released any gameplay trailer or videos yet. We are revealing bits of information about the game slowly through our Facebook page.”
What’s more, the guys Lucid Labs have managed to rope in Ash Reed to do their sound design. Ash Reed worked on the sound design of Ubisoft’s upcoming mega-titles Watch Dogs and The Crew.
About Roto
Roto is a “very simple game requiring no time to master. It is not biased towards any specific target audience or age” describes Lucid Labs. The game will follow a non-intrusive free-to-play model. Everything in the game is free (no conditions apply), provided you are good at the game.
Lucid Labs will be slowly revealing bits of details about the game, so far this is all we know.
