An Afghan girl hero is the star of this new game from an all-female team of coders

(Courtesy of the Afghan Hero Game)

When my teammates and I first started work on the Afghan Hero Girl game, we sought to create a fun game but one that also showed that Afghan girls are capable of solving challenges and doing great things. We came up with a character that embodies the incredible abilities and powers that Afghan girls have but aren’t allowed to use: the princess. 

Set in an imaginary world, the princess lives in a beautiful, calm land with her family. She always defends her people and their land against the magician. On a beautiful spring day when the princess goes to hunt outside the castle, the magician exploits her absence and attacks her castle. The magician destroys the castle, casts a spell on the soldiers and imprisons the princess’ parents in his own castle. 

When princess returns from the hunt, she sees the ruins of the castle and finds a message from the magician. He informs her that her parents are captured and to release them, the princess must cross different territories, fight other magicians, get to the main magician's territory and then defeat him. If she doesn’t, the princess’ whole realm will be added to the magician's realm and the princess' family will become magician’s slaves.

(Courtesy of Code to Inspire)

We chose the main character as a princess because we wanted to show the abilities of girls and make people realize that girls can also be the saviors of their families and other people. Girls face challenges and can handle them well. We want to show that girls are capable of important and difficult tasks, and deserve equal rights. We want families to believe in their daughters and their abilities. 

After we decided on the plot, we broke the game into 12 levels. Each group worked on prototyping a level. Then, we shared the prototypes we had drawn, discussed what obstacles and enemies the princess should face and decided what each level would look like. After finishing the prototypes, we divided into three groups: the sound and effect group, the graphic and animation group and the developer group. 

We faced many different challenges in making the game. We didn’t have experience in sound and effecting making or graphic design and encountered problems when the developers were implementing different mechanisms. Through modifications, internet searches and online tutorials, we did our best to solve them. 

“When my teammates and I first started work on the Afghan Hero Girl game, we sought to create a fun game but one that also showed that Afghan girls are capable of solving challenges and doing great things.”

— Leila Azizi

I worked on the developer team and was also the author of the story of this game. My favorite part was when we were animating the static designs and bringing them to life. I’m grateful to all of my peers, who did their best to make this game work and to Code to Inspire (CTI), who has been our sole supporter. CTI is a coding academy for girls in my hometown of Herat, Afghanistan. They provided a safe and secure environment for us to work together as a team. They helped us overcome the challenges in building the game, bought the assets we needed and always guided us through our project.

After three months of hard work, we were able to build two stages of the game and launch it on the Apple App Store and Google Play. After the game was introduced to the market, the feedback from users motivated us to continue our work and build better games. 

I believe that technology is essential for girls and women because if we want to have a place in this evolving world, we need to have the skills to succeed. The Afghan Hero Girl game shows that girls can solve important problems, we just need to be given the opportunity.