Glimpses

Rats, everywhere! Ever heard of this game called ‘The Floor is Lava’? I’m pretty sure you have. In A Plague Tale: Innocence, some parts of the floor are lava, except that the lava is replaced by rats. Heaps and mounds of rats. Black, hairy rats, scurrying about and tripping over each other. Now we know why this game is called A Plague Tale. As is evident, the story is set against a backdrop of a plague in the 14 th century, with Amicia DeRune, daughter of nobleman Robert DeRune and Beatrice DeRune, and her brother Hugo DeRune as the two central characters. Life seems to be going along just fine for Amicia when she has her first brush with the plague in mysterious and horrific circumstances, and things continue to get worse from there on. I am reluctant to divulge any bits of the story here as it is really interesting, combining elements of alchemy and lore, and is best experienced while playing the game itself. The gameplay is a bit of stealth here, a bit of aggression there, so

Hola!  Thank you for taking the time to know more about me. Given below is a list of anything and everything I have taken up, dabbled in, and dived into. I hope you find it interesting and worthwhile. Games developed:  2012 - First game using GameMaker (Unfortunately I do not have the game file; it seems to have been lost in the ebbs and flows of time.) 2014 -  Repercussions - A Visual Novel 2020 -  Rewind 2020 ,  Trapped Should you wish to know more about my game development journey, you may follow this link: My GameDev Journey

TL;DR 2012 - First game using GameMaker 2014 -  Repercussions - A Visual Novel 2020 -  Rewind 2020                 Trapped First steps I remember when I developed my first game. I barely knew any coding and was looking for options that would help me make a game without using any technical skills. That's when I stumbled upon GameMaker and realized it was pretty easy to use. It must have been, considering I made a game on it without consulting any in-depth tutorials. I was a really impatient kid back then, and deeply hated going through large tutorials. Having overcome the first hurdle, I now needed an idea for the game, which continued to evade me until I went to a funfair organized in my friend's school. There, two of my friends and I did something that I thought could make for a nice game - we searched for a friend's girlfriend among the crowd. It felt like a quest of sorts. And there was my idea. I made a fairly basic game, which had only a couple of levels. The first was

 I have been using Adobe Photoshop for a long time, probably since I was 12. The first work of art I created was a portrait of Harry Potter using Adobe Photoshop 7.0. Since then I've been using it for small edits and manipulations, but I really got into it in my college days, discovering techniques such as layer masking and blending, among others.  Here I present a showcase of my modest works: Photo Manipulations: When you lose yourself to the music - Tried the dispersion effect here on a friend who is a DJ. Color Splash - Dispersion on a bouncy ball. Losing my hair  My last selfie before Thanos's snap The Double Exposure effect - superimposition of the silhouette of a bird over a sunset The man himself, peeking from behind some words written about him. This page belongs to a book called 'The Apple Revolution' by Luke Dormehl. Highly recommended to anyone wishing to know about Apple and the cultural milieu in its early days. Nature's pages Clockwork - a man and a ci

[Originally written on 9th June 2015] INTRODUCTORY PEEK Bully is a game by Rockstar Studios - better known for one of the best-selling games in Playstation 2 history - GTA San Andreas. Personally, I enjoyed Bully more than I did GTA SA. That might be because Bully was the kind of game that came along at the right age for me. I was still in higher secondary school, in sixth standard if my memory serves me right, when I started playing this game. The setting, which was also a school, completely reached out to me and the background of the main character, which is established in the opening cutscene itself, appealed to the gamer in me.  Then came the missions, and the way in which they were presented, the way different characters were developed and the way the whole thing unfolded managed to bind me quite splendidly. I enjoyed it so much that when the DVD malfunctioned after only 22% completion of the game, I bought a new one…after six years! Yes, I could not manage to move on from the gam

  The Woman in Red  [Originally written on 9th Nov 2019] *contains mild spoilers* This zombie survival horror game and I go a long way back. I first played it on my PC…I guess 7 years ago. Back then my PC had only a gigabyte of RAM and I didn’t expect that it would be able to run RE4, but it did. I had heard very highly of this game and had had a fleeting glimpse of it being played on a Playstation 2 at a game parlor I used to frequent. I was really impressed by the graphics and that’s why I didn’t think that it would run on my legacy system. Much to my delight, however, it did run and very smoothly at that. My very first disappointment with it came soon enough. Like every other point-and-shoot game, I expected Leon’s aim to follow the movements of my mouse but as it turned out, the mouse was only used to get Leon to merely point his gun and shoot. The aim was moved with the arrow keys. Getting over this hurdle was not very difficult though; I quickly got used to it. The second o

 [Originally written on 22nd Sep 2019] I just finished playing HP Deathly Hallows Part 2, having completed the part 1 yesterday.   When I started Part 1, I was straightaway disappointed because the game threw a few missions at me that felt less related to the story and more like they were included just to make it lengthier. Then there was repetition – a fair amount of it. For instance, Harry had to rescue a bunch of muggle-borns from the snatchers. This involved fighting the enemy and liberating the muggle-borns from the evil enchantments. The same theme is repeated in various locations, giving the developers some sort of reprieve whilst increasing the game length. They succeeded, although sacrificing the game’s excitement. It started off quite well, though, with Bill and Fleur’s wedding, Shaftesbury Avenue and then to Grimmauld Place. Up until then it was fairly enjoyable, but as I progressed, I began facing issues. To begin with there were these side missions to be completed in

Why is everyone so short?  [Originally written on 27th June 2020] I turned to this game because I wanted a change, a departure from action packed, shoot-em-ups like Far Cry 4 or sport heavy games like FIFA. I knew you had to solve cases in this LA Noire, and you would have to actually employ your mental abilities for this, but I had no idea I would have so much control over the investigations. It’s 1947, and you play a detective named Cole Phelps who’s working in the LAPD. The game felt simple enough at first. Simple, but amazing, because I realized I’ll have to judge the truthfulness of suspects and witnesses from their facial expressions. I wondered if artificial NPCs who are nothing but lines of code, would be able to communicate enough information from their faces for me to establish the validity of their accounts, but when Cole Phelps’s interrogation actually began, I was amazed at how effective the NPCs’ facial expressions were, almost like an actual human was sitting there

  Down with Pagan! [Originally written on 10th June 2020] There are 5 games in the Far Cry series as of 10 th June 2020. Obviously the latest is the best looking, and from what I hear, the first two have good stories and bring a variety to the table; the next 3 are way too similar in terms of gameplay. So   why did I specifically choose the fourth instalment? Because it’s set in a fictional country called Kyrat which is supposed to be situated to the north-east of India, and shares much of its culture with north-east India and the countries around the region – Bhutan, Tibet, Nepal; to name a few. I believed that it was set in India, but Kyrat is equally good.   Up until now, barring a handful of levels in Hitman 2, and maybe a bunch of other games, India has not been a dominant setting in any video game. When I got wind of Far Cry 4 and its supposedly Indian setting, I jumped at the chance to give it a play. Even after knowing that it’s not India and Kyrat that the game is bui

 [Originally written on 16th May 2020] I was introduced to the Thief game series when I played Thief: Deadly Shadows. Having abandoned it the first time because I just couldn’t get the hang of lockpicking, I gave it another try when I got older and more understanding of the game mechanics. This time I succeeded at lockpicking and was totally immersed in the fictional city of the game. I loved how the game provided actual feel of hiding in the shadows, sneaking literally behind the back of the sentry guards and stealing loot, while a story mixed with fantasy and folklore elements unfolded. Unfortunately, the game started lagging as the story progressed, and at one point it became unplayable. I abandoned it, but ever since I got to know that the series was getting a reboot for the newer generation platforms, I had my eyes on it. Now that I’ve finished it, I can say the new game improves upon the older ones as far as the overall experience of thieving is concerned, but the story cou