Event Report: GameLan 3rd Meetup and the Introduction to ‘Jogja International Game Summit 2012′

You, DailySocial readers, might already know that GameLan is a startup game dev community from Yogyakarta. On its 3rd meetup, they had a theme “The Youngster, The Creator”. The speakers on this event were the students who build games, the game development team.

Those teams are Creacle Game Studio from Computer Science Department of UGM, Amagine Interactive from Electronic Engineering Department of UGM, and IndonesiaMini from Information System Department of UKDW.

The first speaker was from Creacle Game Studio, Gathot Fajar. He is one of Creacle’s crews. He explained that Creacle was established in 2011 by several Computer Science Department of UGM students with the vision to develop game on all platforms with local content.

In the early days, these students developed a game named Legenda Gathotkaca on Flash platform. It was presented on Gemastik 2009 and won the third place on game development category on that event. Then, Creacle team made another game on Flash platform that works on Facebook, called Math academy. This game was also being one of the finalists on Gemastik 2010.

The next game created by Creacle is GreenGuard for Windows Phone 7 platform. Developed since the early of 2011, GreenGuard has been nominated on several competitions such as INAICTA 2011 on “Mobile Game Category”. Another game they developed is Let’s Innovate that became nominee on CompFest 2011.

The most interesting game from Creacle is Arjuna Sang Pemanah. This game is for J2ME platform. It had won competitions held by Nokia such as on Jogja Game Expo (1st winner) and CHIP-Nokia Mobile Game DevWar (3rd winner). This game has been downloaded for more than 90.000 on Nokia Ovi Store. They have also other J2ME games with local taste are Nakula Sadewa in The Labiryth and Bima the Conqueror.

After Creacle, the next speaker on the meetup were 4 students of Electrical Engineering UGM: Dennis Adriansyah Ganda, Vicky Fazlurrahman, Supradi Sitepu, and Damas Nawanda. Amagine Interactive established in March 2011.

Their first game is RocketBoy, on Android platform. It has been available on Android Market. Dennis also shared his experience on this game development. It was developed in 3 months while Dennis and his team had no experience on Android app development.

There are some interesting tips from Dennis that learnt from RocketBoy development, as follow:

• Fregmentation and Ratting Effects, it is when the game has been released and available on market, we will get feedback from users. Then we improve our game according to users’ feedback.
• Monetization Methods, it is the method to monetizing our game. It can be done by ads-based, freemium, third-party market, localization, and device-bundled. Is the method to monetizing our game.
• Polish Polish Polish!! The important thing is to keep improving and polishing our game. Do not release it on alpha or beta version.

The last speaker on the meetup was from IndonesiaMini, the game developer of Akhihabara a HTML5-based framework game. Radita Liem explained that this game also nominated at Gemastik 2011. This game is planned to be social game with local content. In this game, players take a role as young and hard working villager. You may try this HTML5-based game by visiting www.indonesiamini.com/inmi.html.

Besides those presentations, there was also mini session in which some students demonstrate their game, info sharing from other community, and info sharing by Yansen Kamto from Kibar Kreasi who introduced a big event that will be held in Yogyakarta in May 2012. The Event is called “Jogja International Game Summit 2012” and will be focused on games that are planned to attract big game companies from the US and Europe.

This GameLan meetup is quite rousing with experience and information sharing that can widen our knowledge. There was also interesting info from other community, including the info of game summit event that is worth waiting.

Ps: at this meetup, we also got information that Nokia has been build space to develop app or game on platforms owned by Nokia in Yogyakarta. This place is called as CoderSpace. We plan to visit that space. So, wait the information about in only on DailySocial.