The early journey
Shiben Bhattacharjee was born and brought up in Jabalpur, a small town in Madhya Pradesh. He graduated from IIIT Hyderabad in the computer science domain, soon after completing college, he started his corporate world journey with a tech job but turned out to be not satisfactory for him.
Shiben decided to change the industry and started working with Dreamworks Animation as a VFX artist, where he got the professional insight into the creative industry. After looking at the booming startup culture in India, Shiben decided to work with an Indian Venture, which makes Video Games. Now, he is the proud founder of Dhantra Studios.
Check out Shiben Bhattacharjee on Linkedin.
What does the Dhantra Studio do?
Dhantra Studio clutches various traditional Indian art styles and puts them in Video Games. The company helps bring an inordinate representation of Ethnic Indian sensibility in Video games.
The company is currently into the development of the next game, which is based on the story of Ramayana from vanaar’s perspective and uses the Srikalahasti Kalamkari art style.
Check out the Dhantra Studio’s website here.
Idea and Inspiration behind Dhantra
Shiben traveled around the country and felt overwhelmed by the scale and variation in our culture. He wanted to share this feeling of epicness and richness of Indian culture with everyone.
Thus he decided to represent Indian ethnic sensibilities and culture into unfitting art forms, maintain the traditional art styles, by serving them in a modern contemporary medium through video games.
Check out the Dhantra Studio’s website here.
Challenges faced in the Outset
There was a lot of risks to change the habituation of seeing Western ideas in Video Games and instead offer Indian ideas. But after the release of Krishna Legends, the risk was rewarded with great reviews.
Apart from this, Shiben faced challenges with the company’s social media account setups as the business tools offered by today’s big tech providers are not that polished and offer very little support. Some features are broken to date.
First Milestone and Recent Collaborations by Dhantra
The first milestone of the company was to develop a game from ideation to being polished and bug-free within a period of four months and it was well accomplished.
The company has recently set collaborations with Shiben’s colleague entrepreneur’s ventures, Native Puppets, and VanarSena Studios.
Dhantra – Growth and Vision
The company has the vision of becoming an iconic brand, which leads the industry with jaw-dropping beauty of Indian art, folk stories, and historical marvels world wide presented in the form of Video games.
The company intends Dhantra Studio to become a unique brand and also wants people of India to feel proud about the nature of the company, which brings representation of ethnicity in a contemporary art form via Video Games.
The company has flourished well in no time, maintaining the minimum-viable-product stage position. The company has also managed a production schedule maintaining quality, and preparing for a release on a more serious platform.
