The Seat of Troubles
The Seat of Troubles is an upcoming stop-motion-animated historical fiction indie short-film written, directed, shot, animated, production-designed, edited, and sound-designed by myself. Set in my fictional country of Ayistan during the mid-nineteenth century, the film chronicles the iconic sequence of events that catalysed a brutal war between a small island kingdom and a ruthless global empire. The short-film is under active development and is expected to release in 2026.
A Thug’s Ascension
A Thug’s Ascension is a low-poly narrative-driven action-adventure/FPS video game developed by my studio and published by the British company Keymailer. After it was announced at DevGAMM Lisbon 2023, IndiaGDC 2023, and DreamHack Beyond SIS 2023, and featured on IGN among many others, A Thug’s Ascension released on Steam on 19 January, 2024 for Windows and macOS. The game received positive reviews from both players and critics.
An engaging, entertaining crime drama
A beautiful story
A tale that engages with its depth and complexity
Its story is the game’s predominant focus, which is a dark, slow-paced, character-driven crime drama set in the fictional Indian city of Marathanagar (inspired from Mumbai), circa 2023. It follows two broken men—mercenary underboss Chief and billionaire industrialist Dr. Sarkar—as their conflicting objectives and ideologies pit them against each other in an all-out war for the future of their hometown. In terms of gameplay, A Thug’s Ascension combines first-person shooting, driving, and exploration to create a multimodal campaign made up of fifteen story chapters, all demanding varying playstyles, everything from explosive gangwars to city-wide car chases.
I served in the production as writer-director, cinematographer, lead game designer, programmer, animator, and texture artist, among other responsibilities, leading a three-person team as creative director at Moonwalk Games. I first conceptualised A Thug’s Ascension back in 2016, when I was twelve. I used to daydream about the game for every waking minute and fill up entire notebooks with mission sequences and worldbuilding ideas. I launched Moonwalk Games in July 2017 at age thirteen, and in March the next year, my middle-school best friend Diwangshu ‘DK’ Kakoty hopped on as 3D artist, after which we were all set. Development started on 1 September, 2018, and lasted over five years.
If you’re interested, you can buy the game on Steam.
Bora
Bora is a speculated epic science-fiction drama with a complex, character- and intrigue-driven narrative told from multiple points of view. Set in the post-war society of the twenty-sixth century, the series chronicles an ideological armed conflict that breaks out during the nanotechnology-driven colonisation efforts on a fictional exoplanet called Bora.
Bora is a project that is as massive in scope as it is excrutiatingly difficult to execute. As such, it is currently not my primary active project, meaning I only work on it on the side from from time to time. I have been conceptualising and developing the story since age fourteen, and my plan is to keep rethinking and rewriting it again and again until I become an artist good enough to properly realise it.
Adi Chandra 