You can read the review here or view the screen shots of it after the jump.

You can download the whole podcast here or just listen to the review section of our game here.

If you haven’t played the game, don’t worry, you can get it here.

After more than 20 years of reading ,and recently watching, reviews of other games, it’s such an awesome feeling to have your game reviewed, especially when it’s a good one!

Our friends at Pejdo Game, reviewed “Hasan Kachal and Secret of The Red Apple” and game it a generous 8/10! The review is in Persian and you can read it here!

In case you haven’t already, you can get the game at this link.

Hi,

I made an installer for Hasan Kachal (using NSIS which is great and I recommend it to you to use on your projects and is built by the great guys at Nullsoft who created the only music player that I use for all my life, Winamp) and it’s ready to download.

It’s a side scrolling platformer with theme of fighting with laziness. There is a timer that is constantly decreasing and you have to gain more time by eating proper apples, just like the Persian story. It’s developed on XNA 3.1 and has 10 unique music tracks each fit to each level theme.

So with no more further blabbering, here is the link: Download Link (52 MiB).

(note: If your Windows version is older than Windows 7, you may need to install this too)

This is probably not end of Hasan Kachal as I have some plans to port it on some platforms.

Hope you enjoy it and please leave any feedback in the comments section.

For the past few weeks I was mostly thinking rather than writing code and was about to design a good level architecture to support my needs for 100+ levels and 7+ themes that I have in mind for DKP, which incorporates different level objectives for levels. Think of it like Call of Duty multiplayer modes, you can play the same map with different modes, Team Death Match, Free For All, Capture The Flag, etc, all in one map.

So even though I’m not hundred percent satisfied with what I currently have, I’m not gonna waste spend more time on it and go with the current design and later when I have a good reason other than perfection, will re-design it, but I think it will be possibly for the next installment.

After paving the way, I can now put objectives/themes for my levels and decide on how to manage the level based on the objective. I think in AAA games such as Call of Duty, they have some kind of rule set and each time they macth the latest action to that rule set and decide based upon that, at least that’s how I would implement it.

The beautify of it was when after all this time, when I designed and wrote the level architecture, I did one of themes in about a few minutes!

So last two weeks I spent mostly on looking at the code and maybe writing one or two lines of code per day which usually came into undoing, if I did anything. Problem is I’m making the hub, which acts as like episode selector in original Quake, and that required adjustments to Level Manager which is responsible on when to change levels based on the level’s theme and when to do it. Since I’m using DAME as my level editor, I have to do extra work to make it’s exported code on par with my game’s logic and code, mostly the order of object creation time and the inner dependencies that cause null pointers, and that sometimes takes a lot of my time and usually makes me frustrated and leaves me on not working at all, like if working in my bed room with all other problems is no enough.

But, my new motto is “The Only Way is Forward” and I actually drew a sketch to demonstrate this as you can see on top of this post: despite all the things that try to get you out of your work, you have to get onward eventually, even if you have to take a few backward steps.

So, I think that sums up for the past few weeks. Usually when I don’t update the blog, it’s either I’m to frustrated to do any work or actually I’m working and don’t have time to blog, because all my productive time is spend on this project for about 7 months now.

Hope my next post will be on how I smashed this Level Maanger’ SpawnerManager cumbersome bug!

I still write in my monthly column in Iran’s first and only game development magazine, called “BaziSzai” (which can be roughly translated to Game Development), be sure to check it out if you are interested, I just handed this month’s article which is about Locomalito.

To update things about DKP, I finally finished spawning problem and I’m knee deep in level transition. Our game is largely based on a lot of small rooms rather than like 10 levels which normal platofrmers do, so we need a good way of transition between levels and keeping logic on how and when transit between those “rooms”. Currently I can load multiple levels but collision detection gets very angry during the process and I’m doing brain surgery on the underlying code in order to tame that quad-beast.

After that, there shall be a system like a Judge in FFTA games to determine the goal of the room, based on the theme it has, and give permission to advance to next room, I expect this will be challenging too. Next is connecting current orphan features to the Judge, like spawn manager to report back so the Judge can decide accordingly.

What makes game development even harder, besides having to work in my bedroom with lots of noises and construction site machinery sounds, is sudden surge of great games, namely Dark Souls, RAGE. CoD:MW3, Rayman origins, Sonic Generations, Batman: Arkhan City, TinTin, Gears of War 3, TES V: SKYRIM, El Shaddai, Uncharted 3. While playing Skyrim and Uncharted 3 is guaranteed of anything but fun, I’m really keen to invest a big chunk of time to Dark Souls because I’ve already read numerous articles on how it’s gameplay been great and when it’s predecessor came, Demon’s Soul, I couldn’t touch it because I don’t have a PlayStation 3 but the new installment is multi-platform and I can play it and see the interesting and masochistically hard mechanics. Of course Skyrim is fun and sound but it’s hardly anything new after TES III: Morrowind or TES IV: Oblivion, they just get bigger and more beautiful but I’m at some point in my life that I rather play a great game called Ghost Tricks (DS) which introduces new gameplay mechanics and next generation of Adventure games, which I’m a big and old fan of, rather than something that we’ve already played two years ago just with resized graphics. But that’s just me. With all the “game industry” thing, all these money sucking publishers, all these needless new installments are inevitable, even when their creators say that they do not want to create a new version, you will be surprised to see the same game again with a II after it next year.

Oh, that’s life.