Jumping Granny, One of Many Games Made by Local College Students

Amikom Game Dev (AGD), a STMIK AMIKOM Yogyakarta’s student activity units, launches its first Android game. The developed game is called Jumping Granny, and already available for download from Google Play so you can play it on your Android device.

Jumping Granny game is quite simple, Game Jumping Granny ini cukup simple, tells a story of a grandmother who wants to save her grandchild who was abducted by alien. Although the download count is not a lot but there is an interesting phenomenon in the launch of the game by AGD which is a part of Amikom.

Student and Game Development

Game development by student is an interesting phenomenon because recently, there are game dev startups run by students, especially in Yogyakarta region. We have reported about some of those game dev startups in DailySocial, some have also won several accountable competitions held by vendors and some other have produced their own game for various platforms such as Android and Nokia device.

Since the establishment of GameLan community (a game dev startup community in Yogyakarta), students’ enthusiasm can be seen from several meetups held. This event can be one of the many factors in the ‘contagion’ process of game development spirit from those who already own a studio to those who are still learning.

Another factor that support the game dev development in this city is the existence of big game company - Gameloft which opens its office in Yogya. Many developers in the company are students who haven’t finish their studies and some of these students decided to start their own game studio.

Another supporting factor is the presence of startup community in many cities, not only in Yogyakarta. For example, in Jakarta, Depok, Bandung and Surabaya. In these cities, there are game studios owned by students such as Creacle, Amagine Interactive, ChocoArts, Org,com, Tinker Games, etc. Some of those studios have also won competitions and made their own games for many platforms and available in the app stores of each platform.

This development is certainly good enough because it contributes to the building of game development ecosystem on the whole. The students can also develop their talent. But it seems that the present condition needs to be balanced with collaboration between marketing and business with many third parties, be it from game publisher or may be incubator, vendor and investor. Both are needed because most of those game studios excel only in the development/production but lack the business feel. Collaboration can help the development so the student game developers do not get stuck in certain level but grow rapidly, instead.