There was a point during high school when I attempted to create a game. It was meant to be a King’s Quest-style point-and-click adventure that starred a dollop of sentient whipped cream (or possibly mayonnaise). This didn’t end up going very far, and my gamedev hopes wound up stalling out for good when I discovered that animating pixels isn’t as easy as filling notebooks up with pencil doodles. But that difficulty hasn’t stopped two teenagers in Jaipur, India, who have created Alter Army - a strange and surprisingly deep combat platformer that launched this month. They’ve made something that evokes both Vlambeer’s Nuclear Throne and Hopoo’s Risk of Rain, but is distinctively its own thing. You begin by selecting one of four zany characters, and then proceed into the forest, fighting monstrosities to a thumping soundtrack led off with what sounds like an electric sitar. Alter Army's developers are Mridul Bansal and Mridul Pancholi, who have been working on their game since they were both 14, balancing development against schoolwork and the occasional need to sleep. They've called their studio Vague Pixels.