In a recent interview with IGN India during the IGDC 2023, co-founders of development game studio, Studio Sirah, who made Kurukshetra: Ascension, talked about the idea and motive behind creating a game featuring an Indian epic.

The straight and simple answer, as per the co-founders Abhaas Shah and Prateek Shah, was that gaming was getting popular during the pandemic and there were “no great Indian games” that had attracted people’s attention back then.

However, the motivation was much larger and the idea was to showcase the country’s culture and heritage through a game. It initially started out as a passion project for both of them, with just a bare-bones paper prototype. However, once they received funds, a full team was working on the development of Kurukshetra: Ascension.

Talking about the challenges, the biggest one was to get together a team of individuals that were experts in their field and where there are individual talents in India, bringing them under one a team was a task.

Another challenge was to acquire funding as being a free-to-play model game, they needed to convince the investors on how it would generate revenue. That is why they ended up with Lumikai, which is known to invest aggressively in the gaming sector.

Card games are usually online games with player vs player (PvP) aspect however, since the studio aimed to show off the Indian heritage, they also made an extensive single-player story campaign for the players to understand the culture better.

The team also decided not to allow players to choose gods themselves to avoid any controversy, and while the reviews from players were vastly positive, some did complain that the game did not present its genre clearly and expected something entirely different due to it being one of the niche gaming categories.

As of now, the game has crossed over 2 lakh players and is available on Android, iOS and PC. The studio plans to continue with the updates as well as include more games in their roster in the near future.