Purpose of making games

4th LIMITED ACCESS festival poster.

I always thought of this blog as a technical one but I’ve been recently thinking about writing about other aspects as well because I find technical stuff, simply boring. This leads to my point of this blog post, purpose of what I’ve been doing with my life for past several years, making games.

Even though I have a technical background, I always had a strong artistic side. Sometimes I nurtured it and let it grow and show itself, which was either as my experiments with making films, experimenting with making music or doing regular sketches and playing instruments. I’ve been lucky enough to attend to 4th LIMITED ACCESS festival, curated by Amirali “Ghaf” Ghasemi, and this triggered that side once again.

I think about my life a lot. It’s purpose and what’s the best way to live it. What can I do to make it more meaningful. What can I leave as my legacy, if any. As I age, I think about this even more, about the true potentials that I have and what I can really do with my life, in retrospect of what I’m actually doing. And to be honest with you, I find making games, just meaningless.

It’s true that it’s the only thing that I truly love, I mean if I turn to be the richest man on the Earth in an instant, I will continue to do exact thing that I’m doing, this much. But it doesn’t satisfy me. I’m still not as good as I want in programming or developing games, mainly because I didn’t just code my whole career and tried different paths as was needed in the project but still it’s not that easy for me. So after a long and hard day, I think about what I’ve been doing and what I added to this world and it just crumbles into, entertainment.

There is nothing wrong in entertaining people, I even find it very good that in this day and age, if you can even make some fun time for someone with your game, you’ve won but people can be entertained very easily and even if I stop doing what I’m doing, there will be someone else doing it. Heck, look at the amount of apps and games that is thrown in app stores everyday, surely there is no lack of app developers. Of course how good or bad they are is debatable.

Sad thing is, people are trying to find a good pipeline to make “better” games. And by “better” they mean a way that they find people like and teach so others can copy it and follow the same path because “it worked for Maio” or something. And that is sad. That is killing creativity by limiting and teaching whatnot. Of course you can teach someone basics but they are more likely to follow the path blindly rather than trying to get out of their comfort zone and do something new.

Art on the other hand, I find very amusing. One can do several things with art, or by combining art into games. With Art you can express yourself, talk about ideas, challenge people, share experiments and a lot of other things which I find more meaningful than just entertaining people. I’m not a teacher or anything but I really hate to be some guy who just makes games so people can buy and entertain so he can make a few bucks.

Yes you can do other things with games like Serious Games or educational games but over the years I’ve seen that almost no one plays such games or take them seriously enough so after several years that they have been introduced, good digital games for this purpose are almost non-existent, due to lack of market.

I can be wrong on some of assumptions that I just made but I’ve been seriously thinking about this and I really feel I can use my knowledge to express myself or be more “meaningful”.

به بهانه فروغ

I tend to keep this blog technical so it would hopefully bear some fruit to someone but there are rare times that I find poems that describe me perfectly and I can’t resist on not putting them here, usually to store them. You, if are not me from the future, may find it useful/amusing/etc. .

It’s by Forough Farrokhzad, was an Iranian poet and film director. She is arguably one of Iran’s most influential female poets of the twentieth century. She was a controversial modernist poet and an iconoclast. Even though today is her birthday, I did not put this to celebrate it:

نمي دانم چه مي خواهم خدا يا
به دنبال چه مي گردم شب و روز
چه مي جويد نگاه خسته من
چرا افسرده است اين قلب پر سوز
ز جمع آشنايان ميگريزم
به كنجي مي خزم آرام و خاموش
نگاهم غوطه ور در تيرگيها
به بيمار دل خود مي دهم گوش
گريزانم از اين مردم كه با من
به ظاهر همدم ويكرنگ هستند
ولي در باطن از فرط حقارت
بدامانم دو صد پيرايه بستند
از اين مردم كه تا شعرم شنيدند
برويم چون گلي خوشبو شكفتند
ولي آن دم كه در خلوت نشستند
مرا ديوانه اي بد نام گفتند
دل من اي دل ديوانه من
كه مي سوزي از اين بيگانگي ها
مكن ديگر ز دست غير فرياد
خدا را بس كن اين ديوانگي ها

-فروغ.

Rot Gut’s OST is now avaliable for sale!

Hi,

Our latest game, Rot Gut, has a fantastic music developed by our very own Lawrence Steele, a.k.a. Satsuma Audio, is a fine mixture of Jazz of 1920-30’s era with retro aspects of chiptune! You can now checkout the music and perhaps buy the music from his bandcamp page. I strongly suggest to check out the music as it’s always on loop as we develop the game 😉

The way of the men.

I try to keep most of this blog in English, to reach wider audience but there are things that I can’t translate, can’t even localize, because of the deep meanings they have in my language and root they have withing matters that I don’t believe they exist in English.

این نوشته، کنار نوشت یک عکس بود از زمان جنگ، زمان مردانی که رفتند. عکس یک مسیر کوچک پاک سازی شده از یک میدان مین بود، دیوونه ام کرد

 

کنار راه دو نوار باریک سفید کشیده اند که راه را گم نکنی

تو یک نگاه هم به این نوار ها نمیکنی

صاف میدوی به جلو

راه همان است که تو میروی

More short movies.

Here are other two short movies in the series that I’m creating. I also added first one too, just for your convenience. (contact me if you are interested in high resolution ones)

1- Remember. (5 MiB)

2- Krapt. (4.8 MiB)

3- hello. (5 MiB)

Music is from Nine Inch Nail’s GHOSTS.

اینگونه

بزرگ شدنم را،
مدیون غروب‌های جمعه‌ای هستم
که به تنهایی گذرانده‌ام؛
حس وحی دارد
..