Aśśa

The steppe provides the blessed grasses. The blue sky wishes you a nice day. Artimpasa grants you a permission for a game today.

You'll be jumping into the steppe to hunt a game while riding your horse and equipped with a bow and arrow.

Scout, hunt, and extract in 4 different maps. New objectives' location at every hunt start. Lets you taste the horseback archery.

Gameplay control hints

• Press F1 to show the hint message during gameplay
• Use MOUSE to aim the view
• Use A and D to orient your horse while moving
• Press E and Q to switch to different move modes
• Hold MOUSE LEFT to prepare your arrow
• Release MOUSE LEFT to release and shoot the arrow

The archer have limited shoot direction. Ideally, shoot from your left.

Aśśa was developed for undergraduate final project within a period of July-November 2024.

Abstract:

The Eurasian Steppe is a large geographical area historically known for various pastoralist-nomadic people since the Bronze Age. The people of the steppe adopt horse archery as one of their methods of combat throughout the ages by various ethnicities living in various edges within the steppe. However, they have also known to incorporate this technology broadly outside military context like hunting, for instance. It is also found that in the eastern part of the steppe, they also utilize falconry as a method of hunting they used.            

This paper attempts to construct a gameplay design of horse archery and falconry based on archaeological findings of the Pazyryk Culture of Saka people and the petroglyphs depicting scenes of falconry found in the Badanjilin Desert and Altai. The implementation of the design includes the full gameplay loop of a session of a gameplay which consists of three states (scout, hunt, extract), horse archery gameplay mechanics, and falconry gameplay mechanics. This implementation is built on Unreal Engine 5 utilizing various programming features the engine provides.

Keywords: Pazyryk, Saka, horse archery, falconry, hunting, game design, video game, Unreal Engine

Minimum System Requirement:

The game is developed and tested on a laptop with the following specification: 

• Intel 8th-Gen Core i7-8650u
• Nvidia Quadro P500 (Pascal, equivalent to GeForce 10-series) with 2GB VRAM, 4GB is recommended
• 16GB RAM

The recommended display resolution by this specification is 720p, or 1080p at 50% screen resolution which can be customized in the game settings.

Provided below are executables for Microsoft® Windows and for Linux. Pick the download file by your platform of choice.