It’s hard to make a game. Yes, it’s technically easier to make one now than it’s ever been before, but most of those projects don’t turn out very well. Yet every now and then, something made possible by the new ease of development stands out in a major way. That’s the case with Alter Army, a game coming from a pair of 15-year-old developers from India.

It started as a programming experiment for Mridul Pancholi and Mridul Bansal (the shared name is just a coincidence) who were looking to get their feet wet in game development before moving onto a bigger project. But audience interest through Steam Greenlight and support from the NASSCOM Game Developers Conference in India ensured that Alter Army would be that big project, and the pair formed Vague Pixels to continue work on the game.

It’s a 2D action-platformer drawing on attacks and character movement more often associated with 3D games, in a similar vein to something like the Dishwasher or Salt and Sanctuary. It looks to offer a great deal of mobility in combat, and you can already see the boss footage above offers significantly smoother-looking combat than even last year’s announcement trailer.

Alter Army will feature four characters with unique abilities wreaking havoc in six biomes of six levels each, all of which will be filled with specific monsters and loads of environmental objects to destroy. Like any good character action game, you’ll get graded at the end to find out just how great (by which I mean terrible) you are.

In any case, it’s a pretty impressive effort from such a pair of young developers, and I’m interested to see how it shapes up in the days to come.