Badiya - an infinite procedural survival RPG set in Arabia after World War 1

* Introduction:
Hello everyone, My name is Ahmad Jadallah and I am the Director of Development at Semaphore. A game development studio based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
In 2013 we released our first project (Unearthed: Trail of Ibn Battuta) on 10 platforms ranging from mobile (iOS/Android), Mini Consoles (nVidia Shield, Ouya), Consoles (PS3) and PC (Windows/Mac on Steam).

We learned a lot from this project on all fronts from development to PR to business and we grew the team size substantially with members from all over the world and a lot of them with AAA experience. We are now ready to take all these leanings to our upcoming project "Badiya".

* Overview:
Badiya is an infinite procedural survival and exploration game set in the desert (Think Lawrence of Arabia). Life is harsh in the desert and players must explore and discover the supplies needed for survival. Although the desert is vast, players have the opportunity of discover outposts, villages, camps, and ancient ruins, and will have to deal with the wild-life and local populations of the area. Players must scavenge for tools and weapons, and must hunt for food to survive. Players are free to explore and discover the environment as they see fit, but they must be careful as the inhabitants of the area will treat them according to their behaviour. Badiya is built around the three key gameplay pillars of exploration, activities, and combat.

Badiya is going to be released in Alpha form on Steam Early Access and once it is finalized it will make its way to consoles in the future.

The first release on Steam Early Access (Fall 2016) is going to be focused on the single player aspect of the game but co-op and multiplayer modes are planned to be added during early access.

We showed Badiya's first gameplay video at E3 2016 on-stage at the PC Gaming Show which was held by AMD and PC Gamer magazine. You can see the video of the event below.

Badiya Alpha 1 is Available Now on Steam Early Access:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/545050

* Features:

• Infinite Procedural Open World: Every time you play you will see different looking terrain, events, enemy encounters, and items to loot.
• Time of Day System: A full 24 hour cycle is available. You can sleep to pass time and regain stamina.
• Weather System: Clear, Cloudy, Overcast, Rain with different intensities, Snow with different intensities, Sandstorms and Fog.
• Character Customization: Control your character ethnicity, skin tone, eye color, facial shape, facial hair, height and weight.
• Clothing: Build up your wardrobe from a collection of authentically designed Arabic and western clothing sets covering multiple styles for head-wear, upper body, lower body, feet and accessories. You can also mix an match if you like (Imagine an Arabian thobe with a Cowboy Hat. That would be cool!)
• Choose your own Camera Perspective: Ability to switch the camera at any time between first person and third person views.
• Survive: Keep an eye on your biometric indicators such as health, , food, thirst, temperature (you can get Hypothermia and Hyperthermia if you are not careful). Balance your diet and food intake in-game because your character can gain weight or lose weight with visible visual difference and gameplay consequences.
• Crafting: Loot everything you can and gather resources to be able to craft all sorts of recipes for weapons, medicine, and tools.
• Animals: Hunt prey animals (for meat, fur, fat and bones), be hunted by wild animals, or marvel at domestic animals roaming in villages and camps. You can also utilize horses and camels for transportation.
• Plants: Collect different types of plants that you can use to craft medical potions to help with poisoning, pain and stamina.
• Camping: You can craft and place a camp fire which can be used for cooking food and as a source of heat during cold nights. You can also sleep in a tent to gain more stamina and health back.
• Vehicles: Authentic military vehicles including armored cars, tanks, planes, and dune buggies with customization features such as tire armour, different weapon choices, desert camouflage paint job, side lights and more.
• Weapons: Utilize an arsenal of weapons including side arms, rifles, machine guns and (in future alphas) flame throwers and sniper rifles.
• Skill Tree: Upgrade your character across three different fields covering (Combat, Defense and Exploration).
• Environments: The desert is filled with interesting locations to discover including oasis, bedouin camps, villages, military bases, air fields, oil wells and ancient ruins.
• Trading: Buy, sell and trade with different merchants across bedouin camps and villages. If you upgrade your Negotiation skill in the skill tree, you will get better deals.
• Guns Blazing vs Stealth: You have the choice to approach each situation to your liking wither its to launch a full blown attack or sneak your way through undetected.
• Disguise (Future Alpha): If you are sneaking into guarded military areas or ancient ruins you can increase your chances by wearing clothes that resembles the guarding faction. This will prevent them from detecting you immediately if you don’t get too close.
• Sea Life (Future Alpha): Build your own ship and navigate to explore different islands filled with treasures, go fishing, or pearl diving in the sea.
• Underground Tombs (Future Alpha): Equip your torch, lantern and courage and explore tombs that are filled with traps, loot, treasures and dangers.
• AI Awareness (Future Alpha): Raise your weapon in front of civilian crowds and some of them will run away from you while others will draw their weapons in preparation for possible hostility from you.
• Procedural Narrative (Future Alpha): Experience a story line that is unique everytime you play along with specific goals. Just like in real life, the end of story is the start of another and in Badiya there is always a new adventure to embark upon.
• Photo Mode: You can pause the game at any point, move the camera around to frame your shot, change color filters, control camera depth of field and field of view and then capture that perfect shot that you can share on social media.
• Map Editor (Future Alpha): Unleash your creativity and design custom maps using an easy to use yet powerful map editor. Set the desired weather and time of day, place different types of buildings, fill the place with props like crates and barrels, add gameplay entities like weapons, vehicles, and enemies and finally gameplay objectives such as winning conditions and player spawn positions. Once you are done with your masterpiece you can share it with the world for other players to play and rate in the community section in Badiya.

* Videos:
- Reveal Trailer:

- PC Gaming Show Interview On-Stage at E3 2016:

- Gameplay Overview Trailer:

- Extended Developer Walkthrough:

- Alpha 1.5 with Enemy AI, Building System, New Animals and New Environments:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EHb1G-zM7Q

* Press Coverage:
- Badiya Might Be The Most Beautiful Procedural Open World Survival Adventure Game: http://gamingcentral.in/badiya-migh...rocedural-open-world-survival-adventure-game/

- Badiya hopes to change Araic representation in Video Games: https://killscreen.com/articles/badiya-hopes-to-change-arabic-representation-in-videogames/

- Badiya gameplay trailer shows a survival sim as envisioned by Saudi Arabian developers: http://www.pcgamesn.com/badiya/badiya-e3-2016-gameplay-trailer

- Badiya Preview by Open World Games Youtube Channel:

* Technology:

• Lighting: Fully dynamic lighting with Realtime Global Illumination (Future Alpha) and color bleeding.
• Rendering and Shading: AAA quality Physically Based Rendering to give all objects a realistic look throughout any time of day. Dedicated shading for Cloth, Skin, and Fur. Snow, Water and Dirt accumulation on terrain and objects. Parallax Occlusion Mapping on terrain gives it that extra depth.
• Cinematic Post Processing: Film Quality post processing effects including Color Grading, Tone Mapping, Eye Adaptation, Sun shafts, Ambient Occlusion, Grain, Vignetting, Chromatic Abberation, Motion Blur and Adaptive Depth of Field. Every single one of those effects can be turned on or off according to your liking.
• Film Style Anti Aliasing: Temporal Anti Aliasing that prevents flickering while removing jagged edges. You also have the option of using FXAA, SMAA or disabling anti aliasing altogether.
• Adaptive Soundtrack: Music track that adapts to what you are doing in the game and changes the mood and intensity accordingly.
• Animation: Character animations are based on motion capture data of a real actor and then enhanced with Inverse Kinematics to achieve greater integration with the world like foot placement on uneven terrain.
• Destruction: Objects made of wood and clay will break and shatter based on the force you hit them with. In addition to fracture being fully dynamic (not prefractured) you can further destroy the broken pieces into even smaller chunks.
• Touch Bending: Walking through ground level plants (Like short Palm Trees) will cause their leaves to dynamically bend and react to your physical presence.
• Water Simulation: Walking through the water surfaces will cause ripples and waves based on the type of movement you did. Water is rendered with screen space reflections, specular highlights, refraction, foam and white caps coupled with caustics for greater realism.
• Dynamic Fire Propagation (Future Alpha): Throwing a fire torch or a lantern on flammable surfaces like cloth and wood will cause fire to spread dynamically in the area.
• Interactive Cloth (Future Alpha): Cloth react to wind speed but in addition it will also be affect by physical objects or characters passing through them.
• Metal Deformation: Like in real life, metal will bend and deform if gets shot or if it collides with other heavier objects.
• Ultra High Definition 4K Support: High resolution textures ensure a crisp look that is carried over when you play in 4K. The user interface will also scale accordingly to show in a proper and readable way.
• Fully Scalable: Choose from several quality presets or manually customize every single parameter to get the desired quality/performance combination you are after.

* Screenshots:











* About the Developer:
Established in 2002, Semaphore is Saudi Arabia's first development studio that is dedicated to the development of ground breaking multimedia, games and simulation applications in both Arabic and English. Semaphore previously developed the first episode of Unearthed: Trail of Ibn Battuta (Now renamed to Al Rekaz) which was released on 10 platforms ranging from mobile to PC to consoles and in 21 languages. The game was selected as Apple’s Editor’s Choice on the App Store in 18 countries and selected to be a part of Playstation Plus game collection in August 2014 in the Asian Store.
The studio's current main project is "Badiya" and infinite procedural open world survival game set in 1920s Arabia. For more information, visit: SemaphoreLab.com or email us at: info@SemaphoreLab.com

 

* Tech Update: Accumulation
Badiya features realtime accumulation of water, snow and sand on all objects in the game.

 

You had me at World War 1. Looks amazing!

 

Very impressive good work.

 

Don't know weather you already knew this or not but you got featured in this video

 

This looks really great! It really reminded me of the movie Hidalgo and Price of Persia with the awesome looking environment, the combat looks super fun and so does the exploration! Great job!

 

Finally a game where Arabs are not terrorists. XD Looks great!

 

MP-18 the first practical submachine gun used in WW1. Available as one of the weapons in Badiya.

 

looking great and detailed. looking forward to it.

 

Wow, this looks really awesome!

 

Check out the on-stage interview at E3 from the PC Gaming Show:

 

Badiya is featured in "Top 15 Third Person Upcoming Games" alongside the biggest games in the industry including (Days Gone, Final Fantasy 15, Gears of War 4, Mass Effect 4)

 

This kind of game need a lot of work and time to shape.
I would like to try demo before buy it.
Good luck Semaphore.

 

I am not fps fan, but it looks good, it looks similar in some ways to BattleField 1.

 

The game supports both first person and third person views. Although alpha 1 will start with just third person and we will add first person during early access.

 

Semaphore Lab's upcoming titles; the survival game "Badiya" and 2D point and click adventure game "Out Of Coverage" selected for the Montreal Indie Game Festival. Check out the games reel here:

 

Al Mehbash is a Bedouin coffee grinding instrument. Check it out in upcoming survival game Badiya.

 

Screenshots from our participation at the Montreal Indie Game Festival where we showed "Badiya" as well as another project we are working on called "Out of Coverage" which is a 2D point and click adventure comedy.

 

* Update:
A med kit model from upcoming survival game Badiya

 

This game looks really, really good. I'm looking forward to playing it asap.

 

* Update:
Al Qirba: A Bedouin instrument used to preserve milk, water and ghee

 

* Update:
The bedouin dagger, one of the melee weapons you can use in Badiya.

 

Badiya Alpha 1 is coming to Steam Early Access on Friday November 11th, 2016!

Here is our Steam Page:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/545050

 

Check out this extended developer walkthrough of Badiya Alpha 1. Badiya is a survival game set in 1920s Arabia post WW1 where your goal is to master the elements and survive the harsh desert conditions:

Badiya Alpha 1 is coming to Steam Early Access on Friday November 11th, 2016 for $20 on this page:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/545050

 

like the fact that you are exploring something different from a different perspective , good job , it certainly grabs my attention from a development point of view , plus it looks intresting .

 

Badiya Alpha 1.5 is available now on Steam Early Access! Featuring a new enemy AI system, Building and Camping System, new animals and new environments!