Hasan Kachal nominated as best Indie game at 1st Persian Game Expo & Festival.

So, after about 7 months of delay, finally the 1st Persian Game Expo & Festival happened and results came out. Hasan Kachal was nominated as best Indie game for the expo but unfortunately didn’t win the prize. I rather not talk about how the judgments are being done in here and why one of the judge’s games won the prize (!), but important thing is we keep working harder!

In official booklet of the expo, they reviewed the game and were really happy about it and it’s still a question why it didn’t win the prize, comparing it with other reviews, Hasan Kachal seemed to be more satisfying than other games!

So here is review of the game from the magazine. Since the results are out, I may put the game for download sometime soon enough.

A video of what we submitted of Hasan Kachal for IRGF.

This is first of 8 levels that we made for IRGF, first Persian game festival. This is a “Work in progress ” state and game changes from that time, but keep to this for now.I don’t reveal anything about gameplay mechanics or whatnot of it but you can grasp a few ideas if you watch it carefully.

If you have problems watching it, you can download it here (~14MiG).

I shall thank everyone that participated for this demo here again.

-Aidin

Hasan Kachal and Secret of The Red Apple.

Done!

After about two months of very hard work and very stressful management, finally we got the competition version of “Hasan Kachal and Secret of the Red Apple” submitted for IRGF, the first Persian festival of video games, our eternal love.

So since I neglected almost everything in this time, I have to do some catching up with things and then, we’ll continue developing features that we left behind to reach the deadline and things that we fantasized during the development but obviously didn’t have time to do so.

I’ll upload the IRGF demo after they give out the results, for obvious reasons, for now, take a look at our disc, yes, we made disks and it has cover too! Like “real” games!

I’m very proud and honored to work with the team I worked with, from guys who did the music and sound FX to my very own Hossein Hoseinian, my best friend and brother, who never did and never will leave my side, especially when we need him the most, to one of the best graphic artists I know, Behzad Rahimi, who rocked our cover and HUD design and introduced to us another great artist, to my innocent Sara Salimpour who during her deadlines but we couldn’t use her work much, accepted all my nags and little edits and others who helped me on forums.

Thank you all, you all rock.

I learned a lot during the development of this game, I actually did more managing that coding/developing the game. Since we are “indie” and is not funded, we had to find network friends and people who we could rely on doing work for us, not asking for money and most importantly work on our tight schedule, not to mention my high expectations of art.

The experience was very valuable lesson of team development, which is my reward actually.

Even if we don’t get a prize, we already won. Having a deadline is very important for bed room developers since it’s a driving force. It’s like that old Persian story that an old man called his children on his death bed and told them there is a hidden treasure beneath our farm but didn’t tell them it’s exact location. So his children started digging around to find the treasure so as you might guess, they found nothing. After some time, their dogged farm started to grow and they found that the treasure was there all the time. It’s the same thing for us, if we don’t win the competition, we already have a full game under our belts, which is great already. Don’t forget international competitions, *cough* IGF *cough*.

Until the next time I return with our dev plan for next release.

-Aidin

p.s. If you want help the team, you can donate us and get disc version of the game with the OST. Mail me or ask here for info on how to doing it.

Life of an XNA Game

One of my concerns with XNA was that I could not find in which order it’s inner methods are called. As you may be interested or aware, XNA has some inner method calls, like Initialize for its Game component and so on. Even though I’m still struggling to understand the secrets behind most of it, I found this blog post to be very useful. It’s from a very kind and cool person named Nick Gravelyn which I recently discovered via their boards who also published some nice tutorials on the subject.

If you don’t want to read the post, just take a look at the diagram here:

Xna Game Flow
Xna Game Flow

تا کی

در پيله تا به كي بر خويشتن تني؟
ـ پرسيد كرم را مرغ از فروتني ـ

تا چند منزوي در كنج خلوتي،
در بسته تا به كي، در محبس تني؟

در فكر رستنم ـ پاسخ بداد كرم ـ
خلوت نشسته ام زينروي منحني.

فرسوده جان من از بس به يك مدار
برجاي مانده ام چون فطرت دني.

همسال هاي من پروانگان شدند
جستند از اين قفس، گشتند ديدني.

يا سوخت جانشان دهقان به ديگران،
جز من كه زنده ام در حال جان كندني.

در حبس و خلوتم تا وارهم به مرگ
يا پر برآورم بهر پريدني.

اينك تو را چه شد كاي مرغ خانگي!
كوشش نمي كني، پري نمي زني؟

پا بنده ي چه اي؟ وابسته ي كه اي؟
تا كي اسيري و در حبس دشمني؟

شعری بسیار عمیق از نیما
با تشکر از دوست خوبم هادی که منو با این شعر آشنا کرد

MiniLD #14

Since I have more time now and it’s 40 days until my conscription service, I’m working much more on my 2D Platformer, still not my idea work time but my delta is way positive than before and that’s what keeps me going, even though there are still false thoughts in my head that I have to get rid off.

There is a competition being held at Ludam Dare site that is a little different from their regular LD (no, it’s not lethal dosage, sorry) competitions. It’s called MiniLD. MiniLD’s are smaller and get less attention and usually have no winner or prize at all but it’s a good boost for people like me to have a deadline, while being indie.

So the theme of the competition will be revealed at Friday morning and we will have two days to hand out our games.

I’m dealing severly with my collision detection, I managed to solve it with programming hacks that I know of, but as you might know me, that’s not something that would satisfy a mind like mine (which is a very beautiful one, indeed).

With now being Wednesday morning and me having a very bad toothache and mood and still caught in that damn bug,  I’m not sure what I will have finished by then but you know what? The result is like that very old Persian saying:

There was this old farmer that had 5 sons that they refused to work at his farm. So at his deathbed he gathered his sons and told them that there is a treasure hidden beneath these lands, so try finding it. You know the rest. I feel even if I solve only this bug by then, I would still consider me self, winner.

Working this year again on a platformer at NLAI, is reminding me of last year working on that MyMario. I loved those days, I spent a whole month on developing a ladder that I would enjoy, and I achieved it!

I will never surrender.