First appearance of Alkottab at Fekrety competition, AUC

Last Thursday was a special day for me that I wanted to share with the world. It was the awards ceremony for Fekrety (translated to: my idea) competition finalists and the first official appearance of Alkottab (maybe translated to: local school) company.

Alkottab is a new Egyptian startup for game development and animations with Arabic themes and content. And I'm proudly a co-founder of this Egyptian startup which aims to attract the youth in specific to games and animations that introduce them to their history and present, and invest in them to build a brighter future.

Fekrety is a national business idea competition organized by The American University in Cairo’s (AUC) School of Business – Entrepreneurship & Innovation Program (EIP), in cooperation with Intel. Although we did not win the money, it was an opportunity to announce our idea to the world of business and startups and listen to their feedback. And we had some small prizes too, if it deserves mentioning as it was not the main goal of entering this competition.

Let me introduce you to the team, and show you the idea pitching by Alkottab co-founder Eslam. The team from right to left is: Eslam, Omar and Mahmoud (me) as co-founders and developers, and Youmna and Maha as artists.

The summary of the pitch for the non-Arabic viewers is as I mentioned before about Alkottab, plus stating that the Arab countries have a bigger customer segment in game purchases than the USA and that's why foreign companies are interested in localizing their games. And because we are very interested in our idea, we decided to quit our jobs and put our savings in this company, Alkottab, and were hoping to get more fund by winning such a competition. Our first product is about the early days of our Egyptian revolution.

This was the first appearance, and not the last (if Allah wills) because we have the idea and passion, and building the experience, and trying to avoid the mistakes we noticed in different startups we witnessed or worked with.

So, this was a small report to share the news with you. And let's hope to see you very soon somewhere in a local/international event or on the market.

Full HTML5 Game Example with Crafty JS

A couple of days ago, I participated in a game jam called "Game Zanga". It was a three-day contest for game development with some conditions: in Arabic, related to a topic announced at the start of the three days (it was "Freedom"), and browser-based.

So it was a nice chance to test my knowledge and experience in game development (which is a new thing to me) and I decided to use Crafty (or maybe some call it CraftyJS). Crafty is a JavaScript game library using HTML5. One great power in Crafty is that it can use Canvas or DOM. Plus the concept of Components and Entities that allow you to develop the game in a OO style.

So, I thought I can post my code for anyone to learn from. Although it is not perfect code and it neads more refactoring and fine-tuning, it is still a good example of how a game can look like in Crafty. I almost did not need anything other than the API documentation on Crafty website (plus the tutorial if you are to start from the very beginning). So with decollapsing the code you'll immediately have a general overview of how the game code looks like, then collapsing the code can do the job to get to the details.

One important note, this game was intended to be an Arabic game, so here are some guidelines:
- The first icon in the home screen is the "Start" button.
- Once the game starts, you have two blue cannons on the left. Click any of them to use it.
- Your abjective is to let the blue soldiers pass ("unrwa" in code) and kill the green ones ("soldier" in code).
- Life points decrease if any green soldier passes.
- Your weapon is upgraded while playing.


Finally, you'll notice some faults in collision detection and a lot of other things in the code, but remember that it was made in only two days by me (a newbie) using Crafty which lacks the variety of full examples to learn from. Anyways, you'll get the idea of a full game in less than 1000 lines and then you can make your own best seller.

Here are some screenshots, followed by a download link.

Download game code here.