Tech Focus: Relive the '71 sensation

Published in The Daily Star
Section: Star Tech
Wed. July 21, 2004

Syed Tashfin Chowdhury

ARUNODOYER Agnishikha', the first-person shooter game, has swept aside the gamers across Bangladesh and abroad, as well.

Trimatrik, a local company, developed the game and SHOM Computers Ltd. has published it. The game has its plot and theme based on the War of Independence in 1971 and the game resources have been used keeping the timeline in mind.

Arunodoyer Agnishikha should be a great pastime for gamers, at least for those who loved 'Unreal' and the next few versions of the popular first person shooting game.

Along the lines of Unreal, Trimatrik developed AA with a composite gaming style of 'capture the flag' and 'total domination of level', making game-play a lot more interesting.

The game has been developed eyeing the international market and the user interface is up to the mark having had six options namely Info, Play, Tutorial, Option, Credit and Exit.

Through the Info option, the player can create or delete profiles. The Play option would take the player to a new page, where they can decide the Battlefield, the Team and the Time limit of the game to be played. The back button would always take the player back to the previous page.

To start playing the game, one needs to click on Connect to the Battlefield and there are four battlefields from four parts of the country to choose from.

The player can also choose teams from the ‘Mitra-Bahini' and the ‘Mukti-bahini' with ‘Pak-bahini' being the enemy.

Just like any other game, the Tutorial option provides a very helpful tutorial to any beginner of the game while Option helps configure the controls, test mouse sensitivity and other such necessary details.

The Credits option provides the names of the publishers and developers of the game and through Exit, the player would be able to quit the game.

The player has to act in favour of the team and as such, has to resist enemy forces, capture the flag, as well as the Key Points. The team-based Artificial Intelligence has added a new and active dimension to game-play and unlike most other games, members of a team would all be equally active throughout the entire duration of the game.

Unlike Unreal, the maximum number of points that a team obtains would make them the winners.

The system requirements to run the game are an 800 MHz processor, 32 AGP card and 128 Megabyte RAM. The game comes with DirectX 9.0 .

The game has some downsides, though, which the developers are trying to fix. For example, it does not run smoothly on a computer running on Windows 98. Some musical scores in the game also are direct copies of already famous and popular game titles.

Leaving these drawbacks aside, the 3D models and design are well planned. Trimatrik has developed the engine for this game.

"We started developing the game four years back and it took us over one and a half years to develop just the engine," says Rajib Ahmed, one of the founding developers of the game.

One of the other most distinguishing features is the Liberation War Archive that the game provides.

"We have taken interviews and provided original accounts of freedom fighters, which can be viewed in the archive and which would help motivate players toward playing the game," says Rajib.

The developers and publishers say they have received great response over the last two months and 30 copies of the game has already been sold in United Kingdom, 20 in the USA and 70 in Canada.

"We are thinking about marketing the game internationally and have already received offers from UK for developing a PlayStation platform version of the game," he says.

The publishers are planning to distribute the game at regional and district levels.

The developers have already started working on their next venture, which would also be a first person shooter game, but sporting multi-player options.

"The game would be based on the current Iraq conflict," says Rajib.