6 months ago we started on a journey, fumbling through the dark tunnel, trying to build a casual mobile game that will be fun and engaging to play. Many times our hearts gave up. Many times we could not see the road ahead amidst the engulfing gloom. Many times we retraced our steps back and started afresh. But never, never did we give up on the dream.

The end of the tunnel is here, and we are stepping out into blinding light. And we discover evil pests swarming about us. It is time we zap them into oblivion.

Today, we are releasing our first game ever on the Google Play Store – Zap the Knight (Lite). The Lite version is an introduction to the franchise, the story and its characters. Its a window to an exciting world that will be. A simple, gestures based casual game that we hope will keep you engaged for a while and help you discover more of Zap the chameleon that steps up to save its beloved town of Nomoresad.

Over the last 10 months, we have made many difficult decisions and many silly mistakes, with a greater focus on games than business. With a product still to come out in the market, the times have been dark and difficult. We should not have been doing lots of stuff as a gamedev startup according to puritanical, conventional business sense. But as I have already mentioned: we don’t care about that.

When the chips are down people change. That happened with some of our core team members. Disillusionment and despair struck at home. Soon the young, bright and jovial Hashstash started having closed doors, quite hallways, secrets and lies. Misinformation became rampant within the core team. No one could keep a tab on who was doing what and what was moving forward. So much so that we became stagnant.

Internally, we only had words and talks of deliveries no one was focusing on. Roadmaps and priorities changed without anyone realising the change happening. It was a termite infestation that was hollowing us from the inside. And we did not realise any of this happening.

The realization came very late: only about a fortnight ago, when all of us were under a single roof. It was then that we realized that we now need dire measures to sustain ourselves. The first step was to get rid of all the pain and negativity. In a series of posts that will follow, I will very openly and transparently talk about how are we going to handle things now.

Owing to these circumstances, over the last 10 months, 3 core members of the team (from the initial pool of 6 founders) have already left the company. Hashstash is a shadow of its former self right now and in crisis. The fellowship of the dream has been broken. We have reorganised and restructured ourselves to react to current scenarios and proactively tackle the days to come. But that is left to be seen.

All this while, as the members left, we took it in stride and believed that someday, they will feel like a Ronald Wayne too. And we promised ourselves that we won’t let this get us down. At times it hurt real bad. But we decided that the dream was far more important than any one individual. We decided that in spite of all odds we will persist till we have a last man standing and that we will not give up even when the levees break apart. We also made a commitment that we have to fulfill this dream not for just our sake, but also for those departed.

We feel responsible to our families, friends and everyone looking forward to our games and so we had to come out in the open with this message. We are still assessing the situation and evaluating the damage done and the speed and time needed to turn around. Yet, irrespective of what we are going through, you have waited far too long for our games.

Today, we swear to deliver. No matter how much blood, sweat and tears need to be shed.

Keep looking forward to hearing more on this in the coming days. We are also going to come out with a status report of all our projects soon. And we will follow that up with getting the games out.

We know these are dark days for us. But even dark clouds have a silver lining. We are still around and all geared up to make games. Thanks to these situations we are leaner, stronger and even more pumped up. The focus is now on not losing steam and the onus is completely on us.

These troublesome, murky times have also made us realise one thing of true importance:
Hashstash is not just a business or a passion of making games; it is a dream worth fighting for. And we will.

Adios, Kudos and Amen.

My presentation is embedded below for your consumption. Your feedback is very much appreciated <3

In this brief presentation I will talk about how Social Media is different from traditional marketing, and also look at some examples of Social Media utilisation from India.

This is a very exciting opportunity for me as SRCC has been a consistent leader of commerce education in the continent for the last decade and more, and also because I will be returning back to my college after a gap of 4 years. Totally looking forward to it.

Meanwhile, the presentation is embedded below for your consumption. What do you think?

We figured that the happy occasions of Holidays will be a good opportunity to make a lot of announcements. First things first, We are moving our workplace to a bigger and better haven from Mayur Vihar to Noida. The new place is as crazy as we are and we will soon have more pictures and videos to share as we move in.

Then of course, is an update on Zap the Knight. Since, we announced ZTK in October, we have gone really quite on it. For a simple reason – there was not much too say. There were some really troublesome issues with getting into the Apple Developer Program and a weird bug with the tech stack we had deployed for Android. Scary thing is they are still being resolved. But the good news is that we were able to take out some time and build ZTK for Windows Phone 7. Yes! The game will now come out for all the three smartphone platforms. And this break also proved successful in adding some fun elements to the game, which make Zap all the more awesome. So, when are we releasing it? Very soon! The moment we resolve some logistical issues. Promise! Meanwhile, keep following ZTK on Facebook for news, updates and surprises.

If you have been following our activities on the social web very keenly, chances are you have already seen some references about a Facebook game we are working on flying here and there. Today, we think, is the perfect moment to announce Social Corporations. Social Corporations is a social business board game – think of social monopoly. But, we are making some real nice innovations on our Facebook integration end. The game will feature elements that you have never seen on Facebook. Heck! We are writing a complete new pipeline just to make that happen. SC is a very exciting game, as far as we can tell, and it is very difficult for me to keep my mouth shut and wait for the opportune moment when to talk about it. But keep watching out for Social Corporations, it will be fun.

And the last update I have to make today is a series of developer-services we have been working on. In a way they were required within our games so we wrote them and after we release the games we are working on, we will be making these services more generic and developer friendly and releasing them. In house, we refer to all these as TrivialTech and for now they are three – Trivial Engine, Trivial Analytics and Trivial Sense. Trivial Engine is a game development framework written in C++ and it will make prototyping new game ideas and upscaling them for cross-platform deployments very easy. Trivial Analytics is a scoring, monitoring, analysis and reporting subsystem that would help developers really leverage social. Trivial Sense is a social semantics engine that helps in making sense of all social data and develop insightful apps. More about these services will soon come out. Keep checking our Facebook and Twitter channels and keep following this website for updates.

Phew! That feels good. Being able to tell you all this. You can very well imagine now the ride the last 6 months have been for Hashstash.  Indeed. We wanted a fun way to tell you about this ride and Yadu (our Basement Cat, Ninja Neko and Guru) went on and made a pack of some real fun wallpapers that clearly exhibit the various emotions of our game development life. When working on a game, the developer goes through all of these emotions – the elations and the depressions, the rejections and the love. Everything. Its an integral part of our game development life cycle. It an integral part of our lives and every single day.

You can find these wallpapers for download below and on our Facebook album. Feel free to share them – all these wallpapers are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution, Non Commercial, Share Alike license.

Here’s wishing you a prosperous new year and blessed initiatives.

Have fun.

The game is a casual mobile game in advanced stages of playtesting on the iOS and developer alpha on the Android. We will soon come up with more details about when and how we will release the game. Until then, enjoy the wallpaper below and share the love on Facebook.

Zap the Knight, Wallpaper. Click to Download.

NID Bangalore is organizing one such TEDx event called TEDxNIDBangalore. This year’s theme of TEDxNIDBangalore is related to three ideas that are redefining India – Modernity, Change, Masses. They will be showcasing compelling and fresh ideas, tools and technology that have brought positive change to the masses, spanning across boundaries, balancing tradition and modernity.

We are proud to partner with TEDxNIDBangalore and help them share Ideas worth spreading.
More on their website.

What we have decided now is a two-fold open source policy, subject to circumstances.

Every game that we release will be released as an open source project, two years from its date of publishing. All code will be released under the GPL 3 license and all game art and resources will be released under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non Commercial, Share-Alike license.

We understand that’s a huge promise, and here is how we want to reaffirm it to you: A game is a complex piece of software that builds upon a number of components. Whatever component is ours to claim, ones that we own and can open source, will be released as mentioned above. All third party stuff will remain as their owners choose to; sadly, we cant influence that.

Over time as we mature and understand the game development process better and understand our community better, we will keep revising this – our open source policy.

While that in itself is very inspiring, we have another ace up our sleeves! It so happens, every time we are approaching a game release, we think of a sales target, one that will satiate our greed for money sufficiently (Honestly, we will do that for the first time in the weeks to come).

We solemnly swear, the day we reach the sales target for a game, we will release it as open source (assuming the two year period is not complete yet, otherwise it will already be open source).

We are not really sure about how all of this will work out. The two year period, sales targets, open source licenses; each topic is an immense debate in itself. We don’t know how this exercise will turn out to be. But we are willing to take our chances and see how it works out for us and our community. Kudos!