Remaking the Hero

I am very much proud to see this project come to life, Epic of Kings, a remake of the hero that started it all for us, Garshasp!

The Journey and the Spiral

It was almost 4.5 years ago that Farshid's brother stepped into our office. I don't even remember why he had come, but from the very first moment, Syros was surrounded with magic. We talked about a dream far far away... a dream as vivid as impossible ... a dream to make video games.... it all happened really quick ... he jumped in the ideas right away and started making 3D models in no time ... models that were exported to be rendered inside the OGRE3D engine... me, being always engaged in little game related projects with no real art couldn't believe how good the fusion of art and code was ... seeing progress every day ... feeling something different this time around ... the enthusiasm of Syros helping us apply a force needed to turn the wheel ... in no time Peyman was around animating the first 3D characters and Soheil joined in and brought excitement with his visualizations ... finding a book called Soshians threw us all in the dream journey of love, achievements, hard days, brotherhood, loss, belief and non stop work.... a journey which reached its destination a few days ago (May 9th) with the international release of Garshasp.

A journey that had many achievements for the team, a team that started from zero literally and had to learn everything from scratch. A journey that seemed endless at many milestones.

As a product, the game was rated mediocre in the international scale among the best in the field, which is quite good considering the journey that has brought it to this point, but what really matters is the process which is in place now and the new journey which is going to take off from this destination or better say this origin.... this is just the beginning .. we're born again ... it all just started!

Seems like a loop at first but its in fact a spiral ... riding the spiral ... gonna end it with Tool:

I embrace my desire to
feel the rhythm, to feel connected enough to step aside and weep like a widow
to feel inspired to fathom the power, to witness the beauty,
to bathe in the fountain,
to swing on the spiral
to swing on the spiral
to swing on the spiral of our divinity and still be a human.

With my feet upon the ground I move myself between the sounds and open wide to suck it in.
I feel it move across my skin.
I'm reaching up and reaching out. I'm reaching for the random or what ever will bewilder me.
what ever will bewilder me.
And following our will and wind we may just go where no one's been.
We'll ride the spiral to the end and may just go where no one's been.
Spiral out. Keep going.
Spiral out. Keep going.
Spiral out. Keep going.
Spiral out. Keep going.
Spiral out. Keep going.

Real Men

Tough times ... really dense ... no chance for under-achieving ... focus necessary ... hard work ... hope ... fighting desperation ... patience ... hanging tight ... patience ... holding together ... believing ... patience ... trying ... ignoring exhaustion ...

All that fuels me in this final path is the real men around me ... oh these are the real warriors ... how rare ... how mighty ... how blessed I must be ...

believing ... patience ...

Latest Garshasp Trailer

Hi resolution version of the trailer can be downloaded from:

http://garshasp.com/downloads

New Garshasp Blog

The Farsi weblog for Garshasp is up:

http://garshasp.ir/blog/

CGS Sharif

Sharif University is running an event on Game Development this week. Here is more information:

http://cgs.sharif.ir/home

Garshasp developers will be running technical sessions in this event, Soheil will have a talk about game character and environment design also.

Gang at Polytechnic

The dev dudes will be at Amir Kabir University (Polytechnic) on 3rd of Esfand. The session will be geared towards the development process of Garshasp inclined towards the technical aspects.

More info can be found here:

http://cgart.ir/events/gamedeveloping/index.htm

The roots

I find myself at the office with only two guys quite often these days. One is Syros and the other Peyman. The same two which helped us start our ambitious project more than 3 years ago. We've come a long way from that time and experienced many many things and a lot of change has occurred, however their determination, attitude, passion and professionalism is exactly today like it was three years ago, they have never let down anything related to this work even once. This project would have never been close to its current status without them. It sure feels wonderful to be working next to these guys...

Down on the up side

Garshasp project, the current version, is close to an end, however, I feel very much like its just the beginning and I have a lot of excitement for a lot of basic issues in our work. It all seems to be the beginning one more time, I feel the symmetry in the air. Its our polish time and I read a very nice statement about polish today, "Polish is when you turn something functional into an Art form!".
Our biggest hurdle ahead is losing our super star and Ninja coder (Military Services) but just remembering how he worked for any of our team members in itself can be quite productive for each one of them. We hope the experience of some Military discipline can even further excel this Ninja.
Focus, like always, is the most important thing we need right now.

Magazine Cover

Garshasp was featured in BaziRayaneh this month. BaziRayaneh is the most significant magazine about computer games in Iran and it has been the first time that an Iranian game will be featured on the cover of this magazine which makes us feel quite proud.

The Garshasp dev team has worked superb recently and such recognitions are well deserved for each one of them. The magazine DVD includes interviews with the guys which are quite fun.

We just got back from Game Connection Lyon and the event was fantastic, we managed to meet many great people in the industry and there was many things for us to learn in the process.

Oh by the way the magazine contains the same illustration as its poster.

Typhoon Ends

Finally time has stopped a bit and there is a chance to write. The past few weeks have been really intense. Trying to finish the remaining tasks for Garshasp and prepare for the Game Connection event which is going to start tomorrow morning. After wild days and nights of non stop efforts, we are finally here in Lyon and ready to start off the first day of the three days for Game Connection tomorrow morning. We will start with a few meetings with some real big publishers and go all the way until 6pm with meetings every 30 minutes. It is a unique experience and something we are looking forward to very much.

The guys in the team have really done a great job one more time for Garshasp and our hope is to be able to demonstrate this good work to as many publishing companies as possible and find the path for this team to get stronger and do better everyday.

The compact days before our trip was followed by a long stay in the airport at Rome, 9 hours before our connection flight to Lyon and we did experience something quite new for a long time, just waiting and doing nothing.

Lyon is a nice city, 25 years has passed since the last time I was in France and I am seeing the Country from a different perspective this time, either me or the Country has changed a lot, or maybe both :).

Post DMF

This year's DMF, Tehran went well. The fair is a real marathon, 10 days from 9am to 9pm but being able to have close contact with the potential players is always nice.

We have lots of feedback forms to study, and lots of application forms for jobs, hope to find a few gems among these.

Garshasp at DMF

Garshasp and the team will be present at the 3rd Digital Media Festival in Tehran this year.
The development team will present a few workshops during the festival, here is the schedule.

Saturday (11 Mehr, 16:00) - Garshasp Development Process, the development team
Sunday (12 Mehr, 10:00) - Debugging Techniques for Games, Faham Negini
Sunday (12 Mehr, 11:00) - Post Processing on the GPU and Real-time GPU programs, Yaser Zhian
Sunday (12 Mehr, 15:00) - The new features of C++0x, Yaser Zhian
Sunday (12 Mehr, 16:00) - AI using HFSM, Amir H. Fassihi
Sunday (12 Mehr, 17:00) - The process of making a game level, Syros Pourlatifi, Hossein Hosseinian, Faham Negini
Sunday (12 Mehr, 19:00) - The process of creating a Game Characters, Syros Pourlatifi, Mohammad Modaress
Sunday (12 Mehr, 20:00) - Game Character Texturing Techniques, Syros Pourlatifi
Monday (13 Mehr, 10:00) - Serialization in C++ with Boost, Yaser Zhian
Monday (13 Mehr, 11:00) - Physics Engines and Nvidia PhysX, Amir H. Fassihi
Tuesday (14 Mehr, 10:00) - Life as a Technical Artist, Aidin Zolghadr
Tuesday (14 Mehr, 11:00) - Techniques for variety in Game Play Design, Hossein Hosseinian, Hadi Eskandari
Tuesday (14 Mehr, 15:00) - ZBrush Workshop
Tuesday (14 Mehr, 16:00) - The Design of a Board Game Workshop

An initial registration (free) for the workshops can be done here: http:://www.ircg.ir

A world of Magnets and Miracles

Now that is the anniversary, all that can be said is:

"The grass was greener
The light was brighter

With friends surrounded
The night of wonder

The taste was sweeter
The nights of wonder"

Alas we did reach the " ..dizzy heights of that dreamed of world" and are "Dragged by the force of some inner tide".

But I shall keep my "High Hopes", my weary eyes still stray to the horizon .. Forever and Ever ...

The good bad thing ...

A strange thing happened this week, something good and bad. With bad which can be good and bad again. Garshasp's work in progress video trailer was placed up on GameTrailers website. Well this is really good because the website is a really important place in world gaming and it has been where we always got our information regarding the new games and just seeing the name of our game in the list over there brings us some joy.

It was bad because the trailer which has been placed on the website is not what we wished to have there. It is very raw and un-professional, a work in progress video which we were able to put together the night we flew to GamesCom in order to have something up on the LCD's at the exhibition.

Game trailers which are going to be showcased as debut trailers usually need a lot more polish.

Now why did this happen? We don't know exactly either since the last thing we asked the guys from GT when we saw them was about the things we needed to do in order to have a trailer over there and they had told us to email it to them. None of our emails regarding the details for the video were replied until we saw that somehow they have downloaded that work in progress trailer and uploaded it over there.

We are still following the issue and trying to replace the video.

On the other side, there has been a lot of exposure for the videos, along with a lot of negative comments from the users. The good thing is that we agree with most of the negative comments and they are things that we have already fixed or have in our minds to polish. Its also very interesting to get some feedback regarding our work from the highest level, the level of comparison with the AAA titles out there, comparison with titles that spend at least 10 million dollars for their development. This experience is valuable for us since the people around us do not ever judge us on that basis and its always a bottom up approach. We clearly did not expect any comparison at this point in time but it just came to us.

The bad thing about this event is that the raw video from Garshasp is probably bad for the Game reputation in the long run, which we should try really hard to make better with the next trailers we make and the polishing we have planned.

A hard slap in the face is good if you can live more "alive", we have to learn from this opportunity to be evaluated directly with the big guys in the ring. Focus and patience can redirect all the negative comments towards our favor. Lets do it team ... we've got lots to do and need to come back better ...

The Fragile Art of Existence

The title was a project Chuck Schuldiner once worked on, but also a description for the current state of what we do. It really depends how fragile is defined but in our case, not being able to reach a few of the not very far goals we have can be considered as the result of shattering and hence fragility to be described around that idea.
We are almost at the end of the Garshasp project and there are quite a few options ahead of us as a team and quite a few options ahead for each and everyone on the team. There is only a very little combination of the above options that can lead us to the good goals we are seeking and this is the reason the situation is so fragile.
We have to decide about the level of quality we want to put in the first title, finding the tradeoff point betweeen quality, time and efforts. We have to think about international releases, in which if we are serious, we would neeed to increase the efforts still more.
We have to find new talent, technical or art related. We would need to test and train these new talents.Finding new talent with good experience is quite hard and so the training part is really serious, which again has got its own risks.
We have to think about the next project or next projects, we have to find a way to secure funding for the next project. The genre and type for the next project is very critical, since we need to be able to focus on a specific genre and our team needs to really become experts in a specific type of games and so the next project commitment we enter is really important.
Our team members need to find the path to enhance their skills, they have to find the balance between time for their personal improvements and time for the project.
We need to redesign our technical engine and enhance it and there are areas which we really need to inject into our code base, such as a threading kernel, advanced animation blending and improved shaders. Knowing how to approach the above and how to balance the time is another major decision.
We have to decide about some partnership offers we've had which again can affect our future a lot.
Up to now, our progress was rather linear and we weren't faced with that many decision points, however, we are in a position right now that we need to select an action almost daily for the next couple of months which only a few can take us where we want to go, the situation is fragile. It is fun to exist in a fragile state, maybe because we feel the existence even more...

Enemy

The Garshasp team puts up good efforts, however there is one big enemy the team can have, a huge monster crawling all over us and haunting the team, waiting for moments to attack, the only enemy that can bring us down and shut down our progress, this enemy is "Ourselves", we can be the monster ...

Garshasp

Garshasp was displayed at GamesCom 2009. The exhibition was highly valuable for our project.
Work in progress trailer:



The new website is online:
http://www.garshasp.com

Big thanks goes to all of our team members who tried restlessly days and nights to prepare everything for the fair.

One

There is only one thing on my mind now...

GamesCom 2009

Ok so I found a chance to write a few words, the past few weeks has been quite strange... the whole Garshasp development team did all they could to prepare something for the GamesCom conference in Cologne, Germany which is where I am currently. All the guys on the team showed one more time that they have the magive in their sleeves, the power in their determination and the skills to make it happen.

Every second was dedicated to the project, we were able to accomplish a lot just before getting on the plane to Germany, we did miss a lot too, but thats what usually happens.

We just went through the fist day of GamesCom, wasn't bad, our booth shows the brutal attitude of this mythological super hero of ours, Garshasp. It has been successful in turning some heads in the business hall.

The last two days were dedicated to the sessions of GDC europe which was quite interesting also. I had the chance to check out the Morpheme Connect tool from Natural Motion in a presentation by their CTO which was quite interesting.

Our goal in the coming days is to evaluate what we have done so far in an international level and learn about the next steps that we need to take. The exhibition will run till the 23rd.

Ok, gotta go now.