This is a post-mortem for an RPG game production in Iran where I was the designer and producer. Unfortunately, it suffered from under-budgeting and untimely payments from our funders, and ended up dying on our hard-disks, never reaching customers. As a first, in my country Iran, I believe there is some learning value in publishing this post-mortem, and I have decided to publish it...

  These days “Immersion” seems to be the big buzz-word for marketing departments. Marketing, being hype-driven as it is, tends to stick that “immersive gameplay” label on every single game retail box, console and demo video they release. On a deeper level, everyone in game development seems to agree that “immersion” is an important achievement, if not the ultimate goal of playing games. Immersion makes players feel passionately about a game and crave for more of the same.

Unfortunately, many game designers have failed to analyze the constituents of immersion, and have treated the concept as if it were magical; impenetrable to analysis! In this article, I will try to explore what immersive gameplay is, and how the state of immersion can be created…

Back in 2005, I quit my job as a well-test engineer in order to start making games, my only passion, besides AI. At some point, a programmer friend and I created a prototype of a fully interactive training environment for oilfield operators. With my knowledge of oilfield equipment and operations, and his knowledge of 3D engine programming, it seemed the right thing to do…

“Cellular Automata” (CA) sounds like a nasty technical term. In reality CA is one of the easiest mathematical models to grasp and implement in computers, and specifically in games. Some CAs also exhibit very interesting behavior over time and can create interesting patterns, so it is definitely worthwhile learning a bit about them.