Coming soon ….

Lets look from a few angles:

Inspirations:
The story of Prince of Persia series are inspired from the book of One Thousand and One Nights. A book written in post Islam Persia (after the invasion of Iran by Arabs) which contains one thousand and one stories. Sinbad as among the most popular characters of the book. The main creator, Mechner, specifies Shahnameh as a source also but there doesn’t seem to be much influence.

The story of Garshasp is inspired from Avesta which is an ancient book written by Zarathustra and also “Garshasp Nameh” written by Asadi Tusi, written a bit after “Shahnameh” by Ferdowsi. The main characters and events in the game have had the most influence from Avesta which is is a main source for Persian Mythology, most of the stories of this book have roots in more ancient times and the main theme contains huge elements of fantasy, unlike the book of One Thousand and One nights which has a more realistic style to it.

Settings:
Prince of Persia belongs to the stories from a point in time where Arabic culture is popular and which is the advent of the Islamic Architecture for buildings. This can be seen from most of the buildings and designs in the series. The type of swords (curved) used in the game are all Arabic swords (Saif). There are a lot of Indian symbols in the game also. There is even some Arabic texts written on some walls in some series. Overall the Prince of Persia games do not usually seem that Persian to the Persians.

Garshasp does not belong to a specific time in history, it belongs to the time of Mythology. Hence no particular architectural style has been followed in the design of the game. However great effort has been done by the artists to not use the post Islamic elements of Persia and study the ancient art of Iran to create a fantasy mythological art style which is highly inspired by the ancient pre Islamic Iranian themes. No Arabic or Indian symbols are used in the game. The same is true for the music composed for the game.

Character:
The Prince in Prince of Persia is of course a prince which tries to fight the evil rulers and there is usually a princess around where he is trying to rescue. The character is very skillful in acrobatic moves and has a slim build.

Garshasp is a type of super hero which is often known as the “Adventurer Type”. He works for nobody, does not stay in one place for long, travels a lot, is really powerful and fears nothing. He is known in Avesta as the Monster Slayer and he lives his life to punish the dark forces of Ahriman. A dark future haunts his life and he will play a big role in the final battle of the universe. His sole is put to sleep by Ahuramazda in order to be waken at the end of the world when the bounded time transforms again to unbounded time.

Now a little about gameplay

Gameplay
Prince of Persia is usually heavily relying on platforming elements, then combat. Combat is much more important in Garshasp than the platforming elements.
Prince of Persia is mostly traversing indoor areas, Garshasp is mostly outdoors, starts out from a city under fire, travels to a jungle, then to the Mountains and finally in a cursed temple.
Prince of Persia has the standard third person camera but the camera in Garshasp is pre-directed cinematic camera.

Some Notes:
The name Dahaka is used in Prince of Persia series which is in fact a transform of Azhi Dahak which is the main Deev in Persian Mythology. Azhi Dahak is the brother of Jamshid who dethroned him and brought darkness to the world. It is part of the back story of the Garshasp game.

Ahriman is the name of the main boss in Prince of Persia 2008. Ahriman is the root of all evil in Persian Mythology.

Elika speaks Farsi in some parts of Prince of Persia 2008.

The Deev in Prince of Persia 5 (Forgotten Sands) speaks Farsi, quite a hilarious fact, smells like some lame Hollywood conspiracy.

Some trivia:
Garshasp started out as an RPG title, the decision to switch to the action genre was decided a little after some team members got heavily involved with playing Prince of Persia (The Two Thrones)
One of the main programmers considers POP – Warrior Within to be one of the best games made ever.
The whole team agrees that something with the combat in Prince of Persia – Forgotten Sands is awfully wrong. (How can the beautiful designed combat mechanism in the previous series turn into this funny thing?)
Although Prince of Persia was the game to push the team over to the action genre, God of War has had the most influence on the development process of “Garshasp”.

Hi resolution version of the trailer can be downloaded from:

http://garshasp.com/downloads

http://garshasp.ir/blog/

“… where the hell did he go? …”

The second area is the RAM usage. GlowCode is helping us find memory leaks. Our target goal for system memroy is 1Gig.

The third area is CPU consumption and the performance of individual function calls. Intel VTune is a real useful tool in this are for measuring code run time. De-synchronizing some sub system loops with the main graphics loop is among the main things needed to be done to free up some CPU time. An example for this de-synchronization is to update the AI loop once in a half second.

On the business side of things, negotiations with distribution channels have already started.

Art by Soheil Danesh.

http://garshasp.ir/node/178

The first sound files we tried to integrate for our characters have been stereo sounds (containing two channels). OpenAL, which is the sound library we are currently using, will not handle 3D sound management for stereo sounds, meaning there will be no attenuation of sound simulated for such audio files. This kept us wondering why no sound fall off is felt when the camera gets away from the characters, after lots of debugging and tweaking every parameter in OpenAL, we lost our trust in the internals of the library and decided to implement our own sound attenuation logic to handle the fall off in the higher game code layers.

Using our own attenuation handling methods meant we did not need to use the build in attenuation techniques of OpenAL and hence we commented out the sound attenuation technique set in the initialization part. This technique was an inverse algorithm, one of the three popular methods for calculating sound attenuation. Doing so enabled the default attenuation for OpenAL which is the linear algorithm.

The next round of sounds we integrated in the game where all mono channel sounds, which is the correct way to make character sounds. The mysteries started at this stage, sound was heard on some machines and nothing was heard on others, leading us to guess about anything and everything that could go wrong from code lines to hardware specs.

What we did not know was that all this time the internal attenuation system of OpenAL was working quite fine and the problem with the initial sound tests had been the stereo sound files. Now the little trick was that the linear attenuation algorithms do not work well, or at all, on the XP operating system but everything is fine on Vista. No sound was heard on XP machines for this reason.

Setting the attenuation technique to inverse again fixed this problem, the problem which made us traverse a full circle just to bring us back to the first step again, oh if we only knew the little trick about stereo files…

Lesson #1: No stereo sound files for dynamic objects

Lesson #2: The linear attenuation algorithm for sound does not work on Windows XP.

Lesson #3: Don’t lose your trust in a proved middleware too early.

Lesson #4: Sound should be integrated early in the project.

There will be some workshops held at this years Festival and the following is the list of the topics presented by the Garshasp team:

1 – Texturing techniques for a 3D character, Syros Pourlatifi

2 – Demonstrating the creation of a 3D character, ZBrush and 3D Max pipeline. Syros Pourlatifi, Mohammad Modaress

3 – ZBrush tutorial, Mohammad Modarres

4 – Level creation using the Iranvij level editor, from concept to final playable. Hossein Hosseinian, Syrous Pourlatifi, Faham Negini

5 – Issues in game design. Hossein Hosseinian, Hadi Eskandari.

6 – Designing a Board Game. Hossein Hosseinian, Hadi Eskandari.

7 – Life as a Technical Artist. Aidin Zolghadr

8 – Garshasp game development process, The Garshasp Team.

9 – Rendering pipeline and Post Processing techniques, Yaser Zhian

10 – Serialization using the Boost Library, Yaser Zhian

11 – The new features of C++0x. Yaser Zhian

12 – Debugging techniques for Game Development, Faham Negini

13 – Game AI using Hierarchical Finite State Machines, Amir H. Fassihi

14 – Physics Engines and Nvidia PhysX. Amir H. Fassihi

The type shown below usually can be found in higher altitudes with a more dry climate …

Initial 3D model done by Syros Pourlatifi, polished in ZBrush for normal maps by Tohid Razavi.

Ashmoogh concept art done by Soheil Danesh.

The task is quite challenging and there are lots of little pieces of detail which contribute a lot to the whole subject. Among these tiny features are, combat hit windows, character reflex animations and timing, camera shakes, time shrinks, particles, sound, enemy anticipations, enemy locks and animation canceling. Our main references for good combat are mainly God of War and Prince of Persia, the two are quite different in terms of combat style but they have lots of good little details to learn from.

The use of magic is in the wish list, lets see how we do in time.

Good combat is essential for our action game. We’ve gotta tweak and tweak and tweak.