Asvathaa Launches Karma Kingdom: “Create Your Better World”. Play with Ganesha, Hanuman on an Island on this Game
New Delhi, 29th August, 2011: Asvathaa Pte. Ltd., a Singapore based game development company has recently launched Karma Kingdom, an exciting quest driven online island game that can be played on Facebook. The tagline of the game, “Create Your Better World”, best encapsulates the game on many levels. From an innovative non-linear user layout, an intrinsic positive message, to the opportunities afforded users to give to charities; the game is designed to lay new ground for social games.
Asvathaa’s intention is to bring to the market a new generation of original games based on the mythologies and stories from Asian cultures. Initially derived from 5000+ year old heritage of the Indus valley, these interactive experiences will have a direct impact and positive influence in the way young people learn, play, socialize and participate in their communities and view the world.
Talking about the game, Mr. Ashok Desai, CEO & Founder, Asvathaa Inc. elucidates,” Karma Kingdom is a social game and utilizes Indian Mythology which the wider Indian Diaspora will find familiar but at the same time the global audience won’t be lost. It took us an year to develop this game as we wanted to provide for a fun and entertaining medium for a broad global audience across a wide demographic with layout and design that will appeal to all. Karma Kingdom is all about creating a different world for the users. The users have to find shelter and food for them and later on can build their own community and as the game progresses, users can buy extra items/ elements to make their community more self-dependent like hospitals, schools, restaurants and so on.
The game combines contemporary lessons with Indian mythology characters. For e.g. in the first rule of order, Lord Ganesha tells the users, to see his/her physical needs. Soon the users build a village, where food and shelter is available to anyone who asks. Then, Lord Ganesha directs the users to Lord Hanuman who guides him/her to take care of people’s social and spiritual needs and build good relationships with friends and neighbours.
All of the team members have found the development process a personal journey. Aaron Matthew, Head of Game Development said of the project, “It brings my love of eastern philosophy to the traditional social game audience.” He added, “I wanted to create a fun game that leads to social good, and Karma Kingdom is exactly that.”The game play mechanism is user friendly that casual and social gamers globally will be familiar with. The game also has a unique day and night cycle feature. The game will have quests for day time and night time cycles where the users can complete the full day and night cycle in 15 minutes of the game.
Interestingly, the game also provides a unique connection between the virtual world and the real world, in a way it helps in improving the real world as you go about playing the game. If a user buys a branded charity item in the game the money paid by him directly goes to the said charity in reality. Not just that, if the users buy non-charity items, a percent of the money raised from this will also be contributed to charities by Asvathaa Pte. Ltd. About this, Ashok says, “we want to offer a personal CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) platform for every individual as the desire to give back exists in each one of us”.
We are currently also setting up developing centers in New Delhi. We want to bring a wave of social games. Currently we have 6-7 ideas that are in the early stages of development and are also planning to bring Karma Kingdom to mobile platforms.
Asvathaa Pte. Ltd. has team of about ten people and also outsources work from an outside team of more than 15 people. It has offices in USA, Singapore and India.
