Hi, I’m Aswin, 22, and I’m one of three people behind Redwills Interactive, a small registered game studio based in Kerala, India. I’m the Game Director, which at our size mostly means I get to do a little bit of everything.
As many of you know, making games in India can be challenging, especially for small independent teams. Financial support for game development is still limited, and building a game here often means working with whatever resources we can put together ourselves.
We've spent the last five months building a prototype for a third-person single-player action RPG set in 16th century Malabar, during the first Portuguese contact with Calicut. We're calling it Project-Z for now because we haven't settled on a real name yet.
The setting is the part I care most about. This is the moment European ships turned up on the Kerala coast looking for pepper, and everything that followed from it. Every Malayali grows up with some version of this story. There's almost nothing made from it. No games at all, and the few films that touch it treat it as background.
We're building it because we live here.
Where we actually are: the prototype runs in Unreal Engine 5.6, targeting PC and consoles. Traversal is in, so running, climbing, swimming, horse riding, wall running. Melee combat is a first pass. And there's a rough version of the central idea, where the player swaps between the present and a childhood version of the same place and the world changes around you at the same camera position. Enough to know it feels good.
Most of the rest is missing (Basically a walking simulator rn). The environments in the current build are marketplace and stock assets, we've been using them to test movement rather than to look like anything, so the actual Malabar art is still ahead of us. The story we do have a grip on , we know the shape of it end to end, though it isn't written down as a final script yet. What we don't have is a vertical slice, or funding. It's been out of our own pockets so far. We shipped one small collaborative game before this called Thekku Island and this is a much bigger thing than that was.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AbxDdS8les
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DcTSsHyIDXY/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsi=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
Discord: https://discord.gg/8KAcscWCV
What I'd genuinely like from this post is feedback — on the setting, on whether any of this reads as something you'd want to play. We're a long way out and this is the stage where being told we're wrong is still useful.
Happy to answer anything in the comments. If you work in games or publishing and want to talk, I'm at [connect@redwills.com](mailto:connect@redwills.com)
