Introduction and History

Developer: RAS Ltd.
Initial Funder: Iranian High-Tech Industries Center
Project Status: Unfinished due to lack of continued funding

It is never easy to write a post-mortem, especially not when it is for a cancelled project. The fact that you cannot play a final version of your game after almost two years of hard work, even if it is just for reasons of nostalgia, is heart-breaking. Writing about what went right is easy, but we learned a lot more from what went wrong, and so I have decided to publish this document, in the hopes that it will be useful for all aspiring developers out there.

Before I begin to talk about the pitfalls and the lucky strikes of our development process I would like to introduce our game and some of the unique circumstances it was created under. Five years ago I and a number of my freshly-graduated friends interested in game development started fleshing out a game project proposal (basically an extended pitch) for an RPG set in the ancient epic mythology and poetry of the “Shahnameh” (also known as “The Epic of the Kings”) and the Zarathustrian Religion. As we resided in Iran, a country where game publishing companies and even development houses were unheard of, we decided to pitch our idea to private investors and governmental agencies (mainly in the culture and IT sectors).

Well… after we got no positive answers during the next year, we parted ways, and each went off to earn some badly-needed cash. We kept our contacts alive though. Having worked in a manufacturing plant as a control systems engineer (I do have some “real” education as an electrical engineer you know! It’s not just all games!) and in oilfields and on oil-rigs in the Persian Gulf, I was informed that a governmental agency would fund our project. I decided to leave my *real* job and start with our game project.

The original project budget we had estimated was around 350K USD (which is quite low due to lower wages here), but government agencies are king when it comes to budget cuts, and we could only secure 110K USD (Just consider that Iran has had an annual inflation rate of almost 20% for the past few years!). As a result, many game features had to be cut; a painful decision indeed. With our tight budget, we figured that we will need a tight team, picked from the best of their respective creeds, on a tight schedule. Writing the world back-story (50 pages), main storyline (70 pages) and preparing concept sketches with our newly-hired Lead Artist took about 3 months. During this time, I acted as the designer and preliminary producer because I am the kind of person who knows a wee bit of everything (mythology, writing, game design, 3D and 2D graphics and art, programming, etc) and I shared project management and financial responsibilities with a friend (we were only 3 on the team and it was easy at the time). Once the money flowed in, we hired two artists, a 3D graphics programmer and our support staff.

Following an initial period of researching available technologies, we decided to go for a .NET implementation based on the open-source IrrLicht engine coded in C#. The engine would require a heavy overhaul, but that wasn’t a strategic problem: our programmer was confident of knowing the ins and outs of IrrLicht, which is a very clean and neat little graphics engine by the way. 3D Models and animations were to be created in 3DS Max and ZBrush, and 2D art was mainly done in Photoshop. Within another few months, a team of ten wildly enthusiastic people were working on the title which we had named “Age of Pehlivans” (“Pehlivan” is the Persian word for hero). Everyone was absolutely sure that we would create a revolution in game development in our country (Ok! There really wasn’t anything going on that was supposed to be revolutionized at the time, but you get my meaning). Those were good times of hard work, brilliant ideas for workarounds, and late-night CoD tournaments, but all good things have come to an end, sometimes too soon.

What went right

Quite early on we noticed that 2D concept art can be outsourced efficiently, at low costs and with great quality. The concept artwork for our game was stunning, well, at least to us. Artists can do great things from a corner in their bedrooms once they are briefed about the back-story and character descriptions. The same goes for sound production and dialogs. Outsourcing sound and voice assets to an established director (in the animation or movie industries) can create great results, and it turns out that many voice-over artists owe directors favors and will provide their services at minimum cost.

Our decision to create a small team of highly-skilled and intelligent developers must be the reason we could actually get on with the work. Professionals in the game development area are non-existent in Iran, but looking back at what my comrades achieved with so little funding still astonishes me. Our team “gelled” and it was a lot of fun watching them at work.

One situation we were extremely afraid of was that the government agency we had been funded by would cut the funds at any stage, due to their lack of understanding of the game development process (i.e. you get to see very little functionality in the beginning.) Much to our delight, however, we could impress them with our concept art and technical confidence (which they were probably mistaking for competence ;) ), at least in the beginning. The fact that they had little knowledge of games and weren’t keen on meddling helped the money flow, and yet the lack of oversight caused thereby, might have hurt the project, as none of us were really adept at game development management. Lesson learned: Lack of managerial oversight from your funder/publisher is only positive if you are an experienced and very professional developer.

Another thing that went right was our choice to use an open-source graphics engine. It allowed us to develop extremely user-friendly level and model editors (I have yet to see a level editor accompanying any commercial game that is as easy to use as ours) and create levels efficiently. The other tools we created, such as our event-based story editor and our rule editor were little fiascos of their own, but we shall revisit that subject later. We also added any and all shaders and post-effects we liked, and at any given moment we were able to extend our tools to do whatever we wanted them to do: a designer’s dream! There were many other things that went right…but let me depart here…and move to the painful part of this writing.

What went wrong: Programming & Design