Event Report : Gamelan Meetup Presented Square Enix

Some months ago, Gamelan - Yogyakarta Startup GameDev Community held their first meetup. This event was very rousing. Last Friday, on August 12th 2011, they held their second meetup at Humaniora Room, University Club UGM.

Participant were very enthusiastic. The impressive thing is that most of them came from other cities, far from Yogyakarta such as Salatiga and Surabaya.

Why did they come to this event? They didn’t only want to attend to this event but also wanted to meet some people from Square Enix - the Final Fantasy game maker. The Square Enix staff members coming to this event were Takashi Tokita - Producer, Mobie Division Senior Manager, Sachiko Takahashi - Bussiness Corporate Planning Division, and Hayato Sawada - Project Investment Manager Division.

As usual, the GameLan gathering is the place to show up the game developed by local developer. SoybeanSoft got the first chance to present their game called Hunter Story. Recently, SoybeanSoft received investment from East Ventures. Not long after Guntur Sarwohadi, SoybeanSoft’s founder, presented Hunter Story, Square Enix and Mikti staff members arrived.

After that, SagedSoft (Salatiga Game Developer) presented some games they developed, a game (similar to macros) - this game is a final assignment project from an ITS student, then Sandals Frenzy (game developed by Guava Games) and UB Games were presented. Next was sharing session by Amagine Interactive. They shared about their game on Android platform. There were also some other games presented by local developers. Takashi Tokita gave opinion and suggestion for each of them.

As stated by Wiku on this link, Square Enix came to Indonesia for their road show program to promote Game Ideas Competition held by Mikti and Square Enix (further info on this link) and one of the cities they visited was Yogyakarta. It was GameLan’s fortunate to get opportunity to present square Enix that was in Yogyakarta to promote the competition at Amikom in the same day.

DailySocial also got an opportunity for interviewing Takashi Tokita at the event. After examining the game presentations, Takashi gave a comment that was similar to his comment at the previous event in Bandung. He said that it was like the game development in Japan twenty years ago when young and hard worker developers organized game studios. There were also some comments from Takashi about Gameloft and its new office at Yogyakarta, presented the video as follow :

ps: we were sorry for the video quality.