Amidst the mass of dizzying first-person shooters and shiny action-adventure games presented at Game Developers Conference (GDC) this year, one game stood out to me the most. Detective Dotson , created by Shalin Shodhan and developed by Masala Games, is a lighthearted and wholesome detective game that is a cultural joyride through modern India. In Detective Dotson , players assume the role of our titular detective to solve a series of strange mysteries in the neighborhood, all while dodging traffic, eating panipuri, and bargaining for clues. Detective Dotson launched on Steam on April 24th as both a game and a 60-minute movie that will transport players to the set of a '90s Bollywood film. The synthwave soundtrack, composed in collaboration with Indian Ocean lead guitarist Nikhil Rao and produced by Sharad Joshi, mixes a soaring flute melody, a funky bassline, and street drums and will have players locked in as they collect clues across a chaotic and charming city. I spoke with Shalin after GDC to talk more about his delightful game, and along the way, we talked about the three Fs of life, how discovery is broken, and why indie games like Celeste , Hades , Balatro , Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 , and (hopefully) Silksong are the future of the gaming industry. This interview was conducted on May 20th, 2025. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. All images provided by Masala Games. Congratulations on the release of Detective Dotson ! Three years in the making… it must be such a great feeling to see it on Steam and that Very Positive rating! Before we begin, can you introduce yourself to our readers and tell us a little about Masala Games? Shodhan : Thank you so much and thank you for speaking to me as well. My background is in games and film, and I’ve been in the industry for about 20 years. I got my start in the U.S. and worked at Pixar Animation Studios where I worked on six films from Toy Story 3 to Finding Dory where I worked as a Shading Technical Director. I also worked at Electronic Arts (EA) where I worked on the game Spore for four years. That was a very long project but very rewarding. Then in 2014, I moved back to India to raise my children and very slowly and organically started Masala Games. Masala Games was started originally to do services for predominantly U.S. clients. I worked in the U.S. for 11 years, so I had a lot of connections and they would send me really cool projects to do and that’s how Masala Games started, to service those projects. We were always really lucky to always have really cool clients and really interesting, challenging work to do. At some point, we looked at the team and said it would be a shame if we didn’t bet on ourselves and make something of our own. That’s when Detective Dotson started about three years ago. That's such a common theme that I hear from other developers – there’s a game that I want to play that doesn’t exist yet – and that’s usually the inspiration for some of the best games out there. Shodhan : Yes! Can you tell us about Detective Dotson and what compelled the team at Masala Games to create this game? Shodhan : When we decided to make our own game, we actually prototyped four or five different projects and looked at all of them and said, “Which is the one that only we can make? What is the true expression of who we are or what we can do?” Detective Dotson was the perfect intersection of all that. You know, one-fifth of the world lives [in India] and it’s completely missing from gaming culture. Completely crazy – it makes no sense at all! If we don’t fix that, then who will? What if someone else makes a game about India and they’re not Indian. So we said “We got to tell these stories.” It also bothers us a little that India is always shown as this ancient or poor country. Sure, there is poverty here, but that’s not the only thing about us. There are a lot of other things [about India] to explore and celebrate. We wanted to tell uplifting stories and show India in a slightly more colorful and vibrant light. We wanted to show the world we walk out into every day. So that was the whole reason behind Detective Dotson. We didn’t think it would take us three years, but here we are. RELATED: The Power of Soul: How Wholesome RPG Zakuzaku Actors Was Translated Into English Game development takes so long! Especially for a small team like single developers or a team of two or three… Shodhan : I don’t even know how solo developers do it. How do they even stay motivated? Don’t they get lonely? Kudos to them… It’s bananas. I remember at GDC, we talked about how so many games nowadays come out of very few markets and are very catered to American or European audiences. That’s what caught my attention with Detective Dotson . Shodhan : When I used to live in the U.S. it was very clear to me that all my friends there were super interested in knowing what happens outside of their own country and especially in India. It was fascinating to them. There are so many things in India that only happen here. They’re weird things that only happen here. For example, if someone builds a little shrine or temple somewhere and it just so happens the city has to put a road there, the city will go around it. They won’t take the shrine or temple down. They just can’t. Sometimes they do things like that for trees that people pray at. The road will go around it. Life kind of just flows here, you know? It’s not like in Western societies where everything is orderly and according to the rules. [In India] we are all just floating through life and somehow it works and somehow people are really happy here at the end of the day. For someone in the West to have that experience through a game… I mean, what could be better than that? Isn’t that what games as a medium is supposed to do – be an escape that takes us to new realities? That’s a great way to put it. I love the example you gave there. It reminds me of the Tokyo Tatemono Mitsutera Building in Japan where they built a multi-story hotel and retail center around a Buddhist temple, showcasing how modernity can coexist with traditional practices. Shodhan : Exactly. It’s exactly that. [For example], we also have a different relationship with animals. Like in the U.S., people would be freaking out if there was just a cow in the middle of the street. Animal Control would be called. Here, it’s very casual, we just leave it alone or we go and feed it. There’s even a day here where you’re supposed to go and feed cows. I just love that and I want everyone to experience and celebrate that. It’s about showing the inherent, unique charm of India. You’ve described Detective Dotson as a love story to India, and I could tell from playing the game. The love and care the team poured into making the setting as much a character in the game as our titular MC was really apparent. The world is exploding with detail and charm, from the intricate sets and backgrounds riddled with Bollywood easter eggs, the quirky NPCs that feel like they’ve been plucked from the streets of Mumbai or Kolkata, and the “wedding dance off” and “drive through Indian traffic” mini-games which scream if you know, you know. Why was it so important to you and the team at Masala Games to create a video game with such a strong sense of place? Shodhan : I think immersion is super important to us. That is the selling point, the vibe is the primary selling point of Detective Dotson . Especially for a small team like Masala Games, we can’t come up with hours and hours of content or gameplay, but what we can do is create a unique representation [of modern India] and cool immersion. To do that, the three things we focused on were food, family, and festivals. The three F’s of life! Shodhan : The three Fs of life. Those three things are very uniquely done here. I mean, obviously the food is just mind blowing. Eating is the primary occupation of this country – at breakfast we talk about lunch, at lunch we talk about dinner, at dinner we talk about breakfast. Food is everything here. That’s all there in the game – there are so many different street foods you can buy and it’s all integrated into the economy of the game. That was very important to us. By family, I mean not just your immediate family, but your extended family. Your neighbors are your family. [India] is a very closeknit place. You will get that feeling in Detective Dotson because the detective angle of the game is that everybody is in everybody’s business. The nosy aunties are a big part of the game. For festivals, we put it slightly in the background. There’s the Holi Festival, where you throw color on each other, and there’s the kite festival (Uttarayan), so you see the kites in the sky. It’s just those little things that give the flavor of being here. Life isn’t necessarily easy here [in India], so when there is a festival, people go extra hard to have fun. It’s a release because life is hard, but now is not the time to think about that, now is the time to enjoy. That’s how society is here, and we wanted to bring that out. The Bollywood stuff and all that, obviously those are tropes that we borrowed to get people in, but then we wanted them to experience a deeper sense of community, the whole gamut of food and a slight flavor of our festivals. That’s a really interesting point! The really obvious tropes are the red herrings to hook players in, especially if they don’t know a ton about Indian culture, but as they play further and further they start to get a deeper sense of the character of India and the community that make up the country. As I was playing, I could definitely pick up a lot of those warm, fond cues. I could tell that the setting was as much a character in the game as any of the actual characters. Key art inspired by Andaz Apna Apna and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge Speaking of the setting, I noticed that there are a ton of Easter eggs hidden throughout the game! Can you share some of your favorites? Shodhan : One [Easter egg] that took a lot of technical work but was important for us [to include] was for Dotson or any other character to take off their footwear when entering the temple. Since you can customize Dotson and put on all these different shoes with all the different costumes and disguises, and then to have this special case where "only in this building should shoes come off," was a big headache for our animators and technical artists and programmers. But we felt it was still important to do, so that’s my favorite one because it shows how much this game was a labor of love. We scratched the itch of putting in Easter eggs in the names and descriptions of a lot of the items you can buy too. All the products are a tongue-in-cheek joke for the things that are odd or funny about India. We have ten different kinds of chai in the game because chai is life. Chai is an obsession for us. The third is that a lot of the team is hidden in the game, just as background people. I think I’m one of the shopkeepers – I think I’m the paanwala, the guy with the cloth around his neck. That’s me! RELATED: Tatsuya Matsubara on the Making of STEINS;GATE and What He's Doing Next As an anime news site, I have to ask – are you an anime fan by any chance? Did you reference any anime series when working on the game? Shodhan : I love animation obviously, I’ve been watching animation ever since I was a kid, but specifically anime, I watch whatever my kids are watching, like One-Punch Man , Naruto , or One Piece . I watched a few episodes with them. What I love about anime is the sheer variety of characters all of them have. I think my kids have outgrown it now, but at some point they were obsessed with Beyblade . There is so much creativity in terms of the character development. I can’t tell you a favorite anime because I don’t follow any religiously, but I sample them all because I need to know what’s up. I love adult animation like Common Side Effects though. It’s on FX. That one is so, so good. Animation is in our blood, we love it, but anime specifically, I’m still learning from my kids. In the ultra-digital age where there’s so much information bombarding you at all times, I think people are rejecting the mass score aggregators and just going back to word-of-mouth recommendations from their friends. The same goes with your kids. It’s a great way to sample something through personal recommendation. Shodhan : This is where we are really going to go off the rails! I think about this a lot. Discovery is completely broken. Open Netflix and you’ll not like anything. Nobody likes what Netflix is recommending. Every single person has this problem. You’re tired and you just want to be entertained, so you’ll scroll and scroll but just end up watching something you watched before that you know is good. This is a big problem. In 2025, where there’s so much content, it's so hard to be discovered as a small company like us. Discovery being broken in games, in anime, is a huge problem that someone needs to fix. I do think about that a lot. Nowadays, word-of-mouth currency is way more important than what the algorithm is going to show you. A recent example is Sinners with Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan. I saw no marketing for that until it was released. I didn’t even know it was out until suddenly all my friends were talking about it and that motivated me to go watch it. And I’m so glad I did, it was an incredible movie! Well, going back to Detective Dotson , how did the team decide on the detective story and to make it a cozy puzzle game? When developing Detective Dotson , did the team draw a lot of inspiration from other games and pieces of media? Shodhan : We chose the detective game format because we knew it would be a substantial investment to create India in the fidelity we wanted, and we didn’t want to stop there. We wanted a vehicle that we could tell many, many stories and keep entertaining the audience. The detective genre really fits that because there is always the next case. Sherlock Holmes has 56 cases! Once we chose the detective genre, we played a lot of stuff that inspired us. The one that ultimately inspired us was The Case of the Golden Idol . They have this sentence mechanic [in The Case of the Golden Idol ] and we kind of just created a graphical representation in an evidence board. In The Case of the Golden Idol , you are basically looking at a scene and finding all these nouns and verbs and constructing a sentence to solve the mystery. In [ Detective Dotson ] you’re kind of doing the same thing except we give you the verbs as posits and you get the nouns from talking to people and exploring the world. Then you put this graphical [evidence board] together and it should make sense as a sentence. That game was a very big inspiration. I love Darkside Detective , a pixel art, humorous detective game that's really awesome. These are some of the games that we played and said like yeah we could see our game as a combination of these games. I love anything pixel art, and I immediately noticed the pixel-art style of Detective Dotson when I was looking at all the games at GDC. The colorful, vibrant setting seems to pop even more with the pixel art! Can you tell us about the development process? Why did you choose to use pixel art for this game? Shodhan : We cracked the visuals a lot earlier on than anything else. The decision to use pixel art was made very, very early on. What we knew was that we knew we didn’t want 3D characters. The reason is that we’re making India, and India is a crowded place, so we’d have to make a lot of characters and the budget just goes out the window. We knew we wanted 2D characters. We did this one experiment where we had this pixel Dotson in a photograph and he kind of walks out of the photograph from this dark room and we were just like “we've never seen anything like that and we want to play that now!” Originally what I really wanted was that the whole game would be photographs of real places that you could just [explore], but that’s hard to pull off. Now, there’s new technology that’s come up in the last three years where we could totally pull it off, but, [in the end] we made the whole world in 3D and fairly realistic with 2D stylizations as well and then these 2D characters just pop right out of it. That juxtaposition really works because the characters are really colorful and vibrant and the rest of the world is sort of muted and more realistic. This is going to sound really artsy, but a really good art director friend pointed this out to me, which is the fact that [ Detective Dotson ] is a movie and a game, the fact that it’s 2D characters in a 3D world…these things are not supposed to work together. It’s a mixture of things that aren’t supposed to work together but they totally do. That’s the perfect metaphor for India. India is a mix of things that aren’t supposed to work together but they do. When my friend said that, I was like “That’s beautiful! That’s perfect.” We did not have that sort of profound idea going in making this, but that’s what we stumbled into and how lucky. I’m very proud of what the team was able to do. I will say that [ The Amazing World of Gumball ] kind of does this. It has an almost photographic background and these very bright, vectorized characters that pop out. That show was definitely an inspiration. Common Side Effects kind of does it as well. Speaking of the characters in Detective Dotson . Even though I myself am not part of that community, I grew up in a place with a strong Indian community, so many of the characters in the game felt so familiar to me. What can you tell me about creating a cast with as much personality as modern day India? Shodhan : I think the first step for me was not to have all the characters come from one person. I didn’t sit down and write all the characters myself. We actually had people on the team from different parts of India come up with the characters and character types. So, someone from the north of India would come up with completely different characters from someone from the south of India and we wanted all of them. Even if they were stereotypical, no problem – at least we should get a gamut of stereotypes. It was very important for us to think quite deeply on the characters because, well, we aren’t expert writers, but as long as we defined the character well enough, the writing should be easy because all you have to ask is “What would this character do in this situation?” Unless we decide to make them do something unexpected, it should be pretty clear what each character would do. That was the crutch we used in the writing and that’s why we did a bit of extra work to give each character enough of a back story that it would make the writing easier. We wanted to make sure we had characters represented from all across India, including different socioeconomic backgrounds. One thing about India is that the richest person will be living right next to the poorest person. It’s almost like time travel [too] where your home might be 2025, but your office is in 2035 because you work in technology, but along the road from you might be walking through the 1960s. We wanted to bring a bit of that feeling in the game as well and have all those people jammed next to each other experiencing life at the same time. I love the idea of bringing in characters from all parts of the country. As someone who has never been to India, I’m sure there are a lot of nuances between the characters that I wouldn’t pick up on at first, but I could tell even from my playthrough that all the characters felt really different from each other. I’m sure that players from India picked up on those differences immediately. Shodhan : Yeah, they could look at the surname and know immediately. But we also wanted to challenge a few stereotypes. For example, what if we had a South Indian chef who runs a dosa shop but he always carries a boombox and listens to Bollywood music? That’s not what a South Indian person would do because they have their own movie industry and their own songs, but what if this guy just really likes Bollywood? It could happen! Yeah, all that cultural context would be lost on me! I would just be like, “Oh yeah, it’s a dosa chef who likes music!” It reinforces the message that this game was made for a specific audience and makes art feel really personal and authentic. If you know you know, but if you don’t, it’s OK, you can still enjoy the game as is. It’s just a little extra for the people who know. Shodhan : Exactly! RELATED: 1000xResist's Remy Siu on the Power of Performance Shifting topics a bit, but as a veteran of the gaming industry with 20 years of experience, I’m curious to hear your thoughts about the state of the industry today, especially with the wave of high-profile layoffs that have impacted many AAA publishers. Where do you think the industry is heading in the next couple of years? What was it like transitioning from a AAA publisher like Electronic Arts (EA) to founding your own studio? Shodhan : We started noticing the nosedive in the summer of 2022. Masala Games started out doing contract work for other clients and we noticed then that clients we worked with for a long, long time suddenly had no work for us. I will say that the gaming industry tends to be quite cyclical, so hopefully the down cycle is complete now and is coming back up, but it’s tough, it’s really tough. Now AI is looming so who knows what’s going to happen. It’s a scary time. Like I said before, discovery is broken so for small studios [like us] it’s really scary. Like, “What if I put my little baby out into the void and no one’s going to hear about it and no one’s going to buy it when I invested so much time and money into making this?” For big studios, they’ll just keep making more of the things that worked, right? So the problem with working at a big studio is that you’re going to have to work on one of those projects. Very few big studios are willing to take risks on innovative new products. I got very lucky that I got to work on Spore and Will Wright had the clout to make ambitious games. As a result, the whole team got to work on some really crazy, cool stuff for four years, but that’s not the norm. The norm is that most likely you’ll be making the next FIFA or the next of whatever worked before. There’s nothing wrong with that – you work with the best professionals, the best technical leads, artists, designers – and you make the next version of a beloved thing, which is a great way to learn. But if you’re slightly entrepreneurial, you will quickly start feeling caged, so once you’ve cut your teeth on a project like that, it’s a very natural extension for you to try something of your own. Maybe in baby steps, but eventually you’ll want to spread your wings and then take off on your own projects. For me, the first 10 years of my career, I worked at EA and Pixar, and then the last 10 years at Masala Games doing client projects. I’m hoping that in the next 10 years, Masala Games can do its own thing and sustainably make games. That is the indie secret – “Can you run an indie studio sustainably?” That is the equation that indie studios need to work out more than anything else. Every year, so many incredible games hit the market. It feels like many of the best games are coming from small teams of passionate developers who are making games that they want to play. I feel like Detective Dotson falls into that category too. Thinking about the financial success and critical acclaim of recent games like Balatro , Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 , Hades II , and (hopefully) Silksong , do you think indie games have a unique advantage over AAA games these days? Shodhan : It’s also because the audience is maturing and we are listening to what our friends recommend. Audiences are more discerning about what they play and that’s what indies have going for them. The true power of the Indie Revolution is that they force everyone else to innovate. Indies force big studios to do crazier, bolder things. Hopefully they can convince the platforms. Xbox does a great job of that. We are part of the Xbox Developer Accelerator Program and they do a great job of supporting indie games. They have no problem putting indies on the front page of their store, and I hope more platforms will do that because they understand that audiences are maturing and they’re tired of being marketed the latest installment in a franchise they’ve played before. Innovation and agility is what we have. Agreed! Players want choice, and, increasingly, games where you can tell who worked on it and what inspired it. Closing out, what are some of your personal favorite games in recent years? Shodhan : I’ll confess that I don’t play as many games as I should. I have a very unhealthy relationship with Clash Royale where I will install it as a fresh account, hit a plateau, and then get so disgusted with myself for spending so much time on the game I delete my account and uninstall it. Then a couple months will pass and I’ll install it and start from zero because they always add so much stuff. Brilliant game. I also really like this game called Mini Motorways . I think there’s a picture emerging for me which is that I like games where I can control a lot of little agents. I love Tiny Tower too. Well, that wraps up our time today! Thank you so much for your time, Shalin, and I can’t wait to see what Masala Games comes up with next!
