When did you play Iranian games in general and hack'n'slashes particularly? I think never. So, please meet Garshasp. He is a Persian mythology hero and his second job is a lead character of the game of the of same name. We arranged an interview with the Garshasp developers to know more about this busy mythical man. Read this below.

Hello. Please, introduce yourself and talk about your role and position in your company.

Hi, my name is Amir H. Fassihi. I am the director for the Garshasp game and also part of the programming team.

Please, tell about Fanfazar Game Studios. How many developers work for your company and how long have you been developing Garshasp? Where is your company’s office situated? Do you collaborate with e-lancers, or only Fanfazar staff members work on the game?

Fanafzar Game Studios started working on games from 2006. The Garshasp project has been active seriously in the past two years. Our office is based in Tehran, Iran. We do not have any e-lancers on the project, all the job is done either by people who work at the office everyday or work on a sub project at home. There are currently 10 full time developers and overall close to 20 people have helped on the various aspects of the project.

So, let’s turn to the game itself. Please, tell our readers about the gameplay structure. What will gamers do in their adventure?

The gameplay structure of Garshasp revolves around intense melee combat, mythological world explorations, epic boss encounters and some puzzle solving. The gamer plays as the ancient Persian mythological super hero, Garshasp, in his quest to retrieve his magical ancestral mace from Hitasp.

Are you going to employ RPG elements, leveling-up and development of the character?

There are some RPG elements in the game. The player gains experience points and levels up. New combo skills and abilities will be rewarded upon leveling up. The health capacity will also increase by finding special health objects during the game.

In a video trailer we could see the hero equiped with weighty looking sword, dagger, mace and blade fitted in his hand. Will we be able to use all of these weapons in the game? Are any of them suitable for beating certain opponents? Will we be able to upgrade weapons?

Yes, Garshasp engages in combat with all these weapons. The dagger and hand blade are used during close interactions with the enemies. The dragon mace is what he finds during his journey in the game. The mace is very heavy but strong.

Please, tell about opponents we’ll meet. How many types of them will be in the game and will there be any differences in tactics we should use to beat them? Also, please tell about bosses.

The opponents are all mythological creatures from ancient Persian books and poems. They are all forces of the dark side following the ruler of the area Hitasp. These enemies are mostly Deevs. There are 11 different type of enemy creatures and 3 main bosses. Some attack in groups, are fast and weak, some are fully utilizing armor and are very strong, some attack you from a distance. Other than Hitasp himself which possesses many magical skills and uses special weapons but is not very big in size, the two other bosses are really big. One of them is a sea monster, Gandarva.

In video trailer we were very glad to see spectacular punishments on some foes. How often will we be able to punish our enemies similarly?

Well, special interactions can be employed with all enemies in order to finish them quickly. Some you can engage with at any time and some you have to beat them and reduce their hitpoint first in order to be able to get engaged with them and finishing them. For some you would need to use Quick Time Event techniques.

As we could know, you have been working on the game since 2006. Have base concepts, design and main idea of Garshasp changed since that time?

Yes. This is the first game project for a team who does not have any developer with game development experience from a country with no game development experience. There has been quite a lot of trial and errors in this time. We started out planning to make an RPG game but ended up with an action game. The original story and main character has changed also.

It is clear that every game is unique, but anyway what games you might compare Garshas with? What were you inspired by in your work?

We were inspired by God of War and Prince of Persia.

Why did you decide to use a persian epic character as a hero of your game? Do you want to introduce him to gamers and beat Prince of Persia, or you think its just a good character for your game?

Well since we are Persian (Iranian), we have access to lots of great Persian Mythology, we always believe that there is a huge resource of art, literature, mythology in Ancient Iran which has never been converted into modern media such as movies, animations or games. We wanted to try and portray part of this culture to the modern world. When we were studying Persian Mythology before selecting Garshasp, his character and stories which have been written in Avesta (a 2500 years old book) and also in the Poems of Asadi Tusi (1000 years ago) were highly inspiring for a game character for an action adventure game.

By the way, Prince of Persia has been inspired by the book of 1001 nights, this is not Persian mythology, some stories related to a time after the Arab invasion and this is why everything in Prince of Persia has an Arabic and Indian theme to it also, not the pure Persian.

Persian settings appeal more to our Iranian audiences and at the same time bring a rather new experience for the western world.

Do you reproduce legends about Garshasp accurately in the game? Please, tell our readers about game plot and Garshasp himself.

Yes, our story is based on one of the stories of Garshasp from the book “Avesta (500BC)”. Garshasp is a super hero which is categorized under the adventurer type. He was extremely powerful and was part of a very distinguished family. His father was the first person to use the holy herb (Houm) as medicine. He has fought many Deevs and Monsters in his stories. Monsters that were led by Azhidahak and Ahriman to corrupt the world. In this game, we finds out that Hitasp and his followers have attacked his homeland Aryasp. During the game he finds out that his brother lost his life trying to save their ancestral mace. He follows on his journey trying to release his town from the Deevs and pursuing the revenge for his brother.

During the game he finds out about the intentions of Hitasp to steal the mace and retrieving the weapon becomes his first priority, fortune tellers had always talked about this heavenly mace, in order to get to Hitasp, Garshasp would need to cross the cursed Jungles of Hoospa and find his way into the magical mountains of Ushidarn...

Please, tell about technical basis of Garshasp. What engine do you use? Are you going to improve it in a future?

The game engine for Garshasp has been developed by our internal team. However there are many components we have used in this engine which are mostly open source modules. We use OGRE for rendering, OpenAL for sound, Nvidia PhysX for physical simulations and Particle Universe and Hikari (UI). We have developed a game world editor on top of the game engine using WxWidgets for GUI creation. We will definitely work on our technology in the future.