Welcome back dear readers!

Today is a special day. Today, August 31st marks the release date of Qasir al-Wasat. After 16 months of hard work, the game is finally complete (or so we convinced ourselves to believe). Qasir is available at our website qasir.adugestudio.com.

If you like the game and want to see it on Steam you can also upvote it at our Steam GreenLight page

Enjoy it, and happy gaming. We hope you enjoy your experience with Qasir al-Wasat, as much we enjoyed the experience of creating it. See you soon!

PS: For those who bought the game at Desura: we are waiting the approval of their system that should happen in the next few days.

As the game gets closer to its final version we can see how Qasir is really going to look like.

You can also check these screenshots on Qasir’s site or on the facebook page. =)

Hello everyone. We just updated the public (and the pre-order) demo of Qasir al-Wasat. This update carries major improvements on performance and some new content and tweaks. As we approach the release of the game, most bugs are being squashed and solved so the current demo is considerably more polished than the previous one we released. You can check it out by visiting the game’s official website.

There are some major issues we need to solve in order to consider the game finished, so we are focusing our full attention to those in order to have the game ready ASAP. Expect some good news on the upcoming weeks. See you soon!

Hello everyone! I’m here today to post some info about the sound design of Qasir al-Wasat.

The concept behind Qasir soundscape came mainly from a perception trait of it’s protagonist. It is not from this realm, and thus have a tenuous distancing posture that brings a layered perception based on its opinions/view of this realm. This generated a scale: things of its realm are less abstract than our objects that are less abstract than our animals that are less abstract than humans. Unfortunately, animals had to wait due to scope limiting and they are planned to appear only in a eventual Qasir sequel. Everything that appears on the game is put somewhere in such scale of meaning before producing it.

Objects have a blend of normal and reverse sounds, animals would be reversed with a strong filter, and humans are so abstract that the they lose completely it’s reference. Every sound emitted by them are heard as a musical note (thanks to Prokofiev and the first animation sound designers). But it is not music itself, as it lacks several attributes. However, one attribute not missing is that every note is under a specific scale, strongly referenced to the Arabic Maqam, an ethnical “”melodic mode”" from traditional arabic music based on improvisation. Also, each distinct kind of human has its own instrument, all of them chosen to better represent the feel of the ambience of the game.

One of the biggest issues we had during the audio development of the game is that everything was… empty, dull empty. We did want to create an eerie atmosphere and work with the solitude of the protagonist in a not so comfortable zone, but… it got too dull. Fortunately, two masterpieces got into my hand (or.. ear =). One was the indie game Limbo and the other was Tarkovski’s movie Stalker. Both of them has a very similar approach to soundtrack, as they don’t really work with music in the common sense. But they create GREAT atmosphere with sound only, and we adapted several aspects according to what we have learned with them.

Wanna check it out how things are now? Download our public demo or pre-order it on Qasir’s website! ;]

Hello everyone.

Well, March was a quick month as we barely saw it pass us by!

But, oh well, it’s April already and where is Qasir al-Wasat? In case nobody noticed, we estimated a late March release for Qasir and yet the game is not released. Turns out that finishing a game is an amazing adventure of finding out that everything is nowhere near finished. So yes, Qasir al-Wasat was nowhere near finished. Ok, it was not that unfinished, but it needed enough polish and finishing touches that would warrant a delay. In the end, we hadno choice but to delay the release of the game in order to give it those finishing touches and features and give us a reasonable time for that final bugfixing and polishing work.

The new release date is up in the air, but it is not because we have no idea of when we are going to finish the game (we do), but because we are studying the best time-frame to release it. If you don’t live under a rock, you know that there is a huge game release looming and we are kind of not wanting to release Qasir on the same week as that behemoth. And yes, this means we have a May release date, just not the exact day pinned down yet.

That said, here is some updates on how Qasir is shaping up as March was a handful of hard work and progress with development. In these past few weeks we actually finished the two major features that was missing from the game, which were both mini-game puzzles we designed to add to the stealth action-adventure core mechanics. Also, we deepened the efficiency of the investigation mechanic, with a new section on the menu where the player can review every bit of important info he gathered during play.  We are currently testing all of this, improving and polishing both interface and design of the given features.

Other than that, as of right now, we are polishing the game’s initial scenes and the general presentation.With those two done right, we will have a good enough opening and early game to be able to release a free public demo for everyone that is curious about the game, but don’t want to pre-order it blindly. We are also tweaking the final areas of the game for them to be more engaging, by adding some new challenges and puzzles while at it. The endgame is shaping up very nicely, although it still needs some polishing here and there as our testers pointed out.

Well, that’s it for now! It’s getting there, it’s coming.

See you soon and meanwhile check some screens from our latest build after the break!

Hello. I just got interviewed by Mike Higbee on Vinesauce. It was a nice interview about Qasir al-Wasat and about Aduge in general, you can check it out here.