Linux Gaming News

Recently I’ve interviewed the Fanafzar Game Studios development director Amir about their upcoming game Garshasp, which I recently wrote about.

1. First of all, what can you tell us about yourself and your company ?
My name is Amir H. Fassihi. I am the development director for the Garshasp game. Fanafzar Game Studios is a private company based in Tehran, Iran which is working on Garshasp. Fanafzar Game Studios is part of Fanafzar Software Company which has been active in business application development for 6 years now. Garshasp has been in development for 2.5 years now.

2. Tell us about Garshasp, is it like “God Of War” clone with different setting ? What can we expect from it ?
Well, God of War is the favorite game for almost all our members here at Fanafzar. Our story is based on Persian Mythology, which is older than Greek mythology by the way. We are looking forward for little innovation in this game too.

3. In your game preview movies I’ve seen some very cool combat moves and combos.
Are all combat moves will be available from the start or will you have to learn them in the course of your adventure ? What skills and weapons will be at Garshasp ?
Garshasp will have combat moves from the start but he will achieve a few special moves as he proceeds. His main weapon is a sword, he will find a special mace as he proceeds. The mace looks like the skeleton of a dragon. There are a few items which have magical abilites also, one of the magic powers is a wall which will surrond the player and enemies, Garshasp will be able to jump out of this wall and confine the enemies in there.

4. Will Garshasp offer some RPG elements such as quests, character build, leveling, choices and consequences and/or other stuff ?
The RPG elements in this game will be very light, we are hoping to add such features in the sequels to this game.

5. Will Garshasp also offer other gameplay options such as Arena fights, challenges, vs mode, multi-player and other stuff ?
One of the features in our wishlist is Co-op play. However the first release of the game is not going to have that feature and we might see that in the sequel.

6. You have chosen the Ogre3d game engine for Garshasp, what made you choose it and what other software did you use ?
We were looking for an open source engine to do rendering very well. Ogre3d is open source, has a very nice architecture, a wonderful community and the fact that it is not a full game engine was a plus for us since we wanted it to be great at rendering and we knew we had to implement a lot of features for our game ourselves. Our core team was mainly made out of technical people and we always had a very positive feeling towards free and open source software. Other software we use are Nvidia PhysX, Particle Universe (Ogre project for particles) NxOgre (PhysX wrapper for Ogre), Boost library, OpenAL, WxWidgets for our world editor.

7. As Garshasp is being developed with Ogre3d engine, will there be a GNU/Linux client ? When it can be expected ?
This is one more think on our plan. Ogre is platform independent, the other libraries and tools we use the same so theoretically we do not have a problem porting to Linux but in reality it might take a bit of tweaking here and there. We are looking forward to the time after our release and right before the pre-production of the next title to work on the port.

8. Your company is based on Iran, I understand that there are issues sending goods to some countries.
How do you intend to solve this problem regarding your game ? Will you also offer a download version so this problem could be more easily bypassed ?
Unfortunately there are some sanctions against Iran imposed by some Countries, this brings some constraints. As an example we can not apply for the dev kits to develop games for the Consoles. About selling our game outside Iran, if we are successful in finding a publisher, then there shouldn’t be any problems. Direct download can be another option as you mentioned.

9. Recently you where at the “Gamescom 2009” conference, you spoke with many people from the gaming industry.
What new things have you learned regarding the gaming world ? Where is it heading ?
Are the game developers more open to GNU/Linux and FOSS ? Please explain.
The Gamescom experience was great for us, seeing all the experts and new projects is always inspiring for us and there are a lot of things for us to learn from. Regarding the gaming world, it would be hard for me to generalize about where the industry is heading, I need to gain much more experience for that, but what has been interesting is that there are two poles, one where games are getting more complex and advanced and another where we see casual and very simple games. The increase for games on mobile devices is interesting also. I guess good developers always open to FOSS but we don’t see this being promoted much in the commercial world of gaming. It is always to see projects using open source, there are quite a few German games we saw at Gamescom base on Ogre.

10. Is there something that I’ve missed and you would like to add regarding Garshasp ?
Thank you, thats all for now.

Thank you very much for the interview despite the fact that I’m Jewish and live in Israel.
This really proves that political issues have no place on my Linux Gaming Blog and in the FOSS community in general.