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Wandah Wibawanto: Taking games seriously
For most of us, games refer to entertainment, a fun way to kill time and nothing to be taken too seriously
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For most of us, games refer to entertainment, a fun way to kill time and nothing to be taken too seriously.
For online Flash game maker Wandah Wibawanto, they could be a wonderful way of mixing business with pleasure.
His working days consist of sitting in front of his PC and laptop, drawing characters for a game he's developing, rendering and coloring them, and finally inserting programming codes to make them alive and kicking.
"It's a figure of speech, that last one," said the 26-year old, who now lives from Flash game making through his own company that he set up last year.
Online Flash games have picked up over the last eight years. It has become a way for game makers to have unlimited scope of audience by offering games for free to game freaks the world over.
While the largest companies in the industry reside in the US or Europe, their engines and brains are scattered all over the world. Wandah is among the young talents that those companies quickly scouted.
"In 2006, I worked for Intelution LLC in Dubai," said the graduate of Malang State University's visual communications design department.
For just over two years, he sharpened his game making skills with mostly colleagues from India and the Philippines, countries known for rising talents in programming and IT in general.
The UK-based company offered him an interesting package that covered expenses for all the nitty-gritty from leaving Malang, his hometown, to settle in Dubai.
(Courtesy of Wandah Wibawanto)
"I'm still young, so why not?" Wandah said.
How did an international company come to recognize this young talent hidden in a small East Java city anyway?
"At first I was sending my own games to Flash game websites. It was freeonlinegames.com at that time, among a few others," he said.
The website was interested in his work and later on requested him to develop more for them. Back then, Wandah was still doing a practice that in the industry is known as "remote work." Basically, the company emailed him an outline of a game and he developed it into a finished product in a week.
With such tight deadline pressure, Wandah completed almost a dozen game packages for the website.
"Seven of them are my own ideas, and the rest are from the producers at Intelution LCC," he said.
In developing a game through the remote working system, Wandah had to work from scratch, from raw ideas on the game concept, animation of the characters and landscape, action scripting, to graphics and sound finishing.
He would then send back the required files of a finished game to company headquarters.
"Working in Dubai, there was no deadline. They wanted quality, not quantity," he said, adding he worked with a team in developing games directly at the company's headquarters.
Two years of experience was plenty for him, and Wandah returned to Indonesia and has since settled in Bandung, from where he operates his own online game making company with the help of his brother.
Their most recent collaboration was "Master of the Secret Sea", a game about medieval sailors, which allows one to simulate the lives of pirates in ancient times, exploring the sea and doing trade in ports where one's ship has docked.
Another game he finished earlier was the farming simulation game "Harvest Moon", where one can get a feel of how to raise cows, horses and chicken, and live off milk and eggs. On the computer screen, of course.
While "Master of the Secret Sea" and "Harvest Moon" are probably inspired by everyday life, Wandah also took inspiration from Indonesian history for his games. One of them was a dungeon crawler game based on the history of the Majapahit Kingdom's renowned grand vizier, Gajah Mada.
Games are indeed Wandah's passion, one that he began taking seriously when still at high school, and later on tried to dissect as he learned programming languages on his own.
"He spent his time playing games in Internet caf*s, looking for challenging ones and trying to find tutorials for the game," commented Wandah's friend on his blog.
It is indeed true that Internet caf*s are his second classroom, where he started enjoying games as a player. As his curiosity grew, he enjoyed more than just playing, but also making them.
"I started learning Flash in 2004. Then I started making my own games," he said.
The more Flash he learned, the more fun he had using the software to help bring his imagination to life.
He has now published 40 games, with some listed in the top 20 of the most-played online games.
Aside from having fun with game making, Wandah is also keen on sharing what he knows best.
He has published a book on Flash game making, and later wrote an e-book on the same topic. The latter he distributed for free through his blog and website.
While friends have suggested teaching instead, Wandah refused the idea and said, "There are lots of ways for one to teach, not necessarily by becoming a lecturer."
Rising to success at a very early age in a profession that many still take for granted, he always tries to keep his feet on the ground and his mind on the games.
