A Studio Built From One Visit to a Rajasthani Haveli

The game began at a single real place. Founder Avichal Singh has said the idea came to him on New Year's Eve 2013 while visiting the Patwon ki Haveli, an early eighteenth century merchant mansion in Jaisalmer, Rajasthan. He founded Nodding Heads Games in Pune in 2016 with Shruti Ghosh and Ian Maude, colleagues he had met while both were teaching art at a design college, and the studio spent roughly four years building the game around the forts, palaces and city textures of Rajasthan that had prompted the idea in the first place, rendered in a hand painted style modeled on the region's Pahari miniature paintings.

The mythology the team drew on was not limited to a single regional tradition. Alongside the Hindu deities who arm Raji through the main story, the developers have said the asura demon clans she fights were built with heavy influence from Balinese mythology, folding a second, related Southeast Asian tradition into the antagonist side of the game rather than the divine side. Raji: An Ancient Epic released as a timed Nintendo Switch exclusive on August 18, 2020, followed two months later by PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One versions; Netflix added a mobile release for subscribers in April 2023, and a PlayStation 5 version followed in April 2024, extending a small Indian studio's telling of its own country's mythology to a considerably wider audience than its original release reached.