Game developers shine at the ASEAN Youth Creative Industry Fair (AYCIF) games developer competition in Jakarta.

Game designer Ibrahim Al-Mahi, 20, looked excited while guiding a child who was playing his puzzle game, titled Land on Stage.

To get a score, the child just needed to move circus performer Philip Craig from left to right and vice versa to avoid dangerous obstacles.

He needed three months to make such a simple 2D game at UpSee Studio, which he founded in January in Bandung, West Java.

The UpSee Studio was among 13 game developers that competed in the ASEAN Youth Creative Industry Fair (AYCIF) Games Developer Competition in Jakarta recently. It was held by ASEAN, the Japan-ASEAN Integration Fund, the Cooperatives and Small and Medium Enterprises Ministry and the School of Economics of the University of Indonesia.

'€œWe want to develop the game industry in Indonesia,'€ Ibrahim said, adding that sometimes he stayed up all night to finish making his game on time.

He said that he learned the basic knowledge of game making at his campus, the Department of Computer Engineering in Telkom University in Bandung.

Unlike Ibrahim, game designer Jefvin Viriya, 21, first learned to make a game through a training session in a game competition called Mobile Game Developer War 2 in 2011, in which he and his older brother joined as participants.

Held by mobile phone maker Nokia Indonesia and Bandung-based game developer Agate Studio, the competition named Jefvin'€™s game, Beyond the Well, the third place winner.

Two years later, in the same competition, his game, Eyes on Dragon, won first place. It was about cheerful humanoid ranger Tako who tried to find his dragon that escaped while he was sleeping.

Such achievements motivated Jefvin and his brother to establish Own Games Studio in April 2013 in Bandung.

For the AYCIF, he worked to create Own Super Squad for eight months for an operational cost of about Rp 120 million (US$8,400). It was the sequel of Eyes, in which Tako is on a mission to save Own World from enemies.

Jefvin said that to learn game creation, newbies could use game engines, a software framework to create and develop video games for mobile devices and personal computers.

Unity, for example, was a game engine that could be accessed through website unity3d.com.

The website provides online training and free tutorials, such as a roll-a-ball tutorial that teaches the principles of working with components, game objects, prefabs, scripting and physics, he said.

'€œTo learn such lessons, we need seriousness and consistency,'€ said Jefvin, who is studying informatics engineering at Bandung'€™s Parahyangan Catholic University.

Game developer Wisageni Studio founder Rudi Sumarso, 32, said that joining various game developer communities could be another way to learn how to make a game.

In the Yogyakarta-based community GameLAN, for example, game developers were available to share their experiences and to transfer their knowledge, ranging from coding techniques, game design, script writing and polishing to market research, said Rudi, who founded Wisageni in November 2014.

For the AYCIF, he created the Indonesia-themed strategy game Ultimate Tower in eight months. It was named Best Gameplay in the Indonesia Indie Game Festival on Aug. 16, said Rudi, who has created more than 10 games since 2012.

He said his games could be enjoyed in the Kongregate game portal, home to thousands of free online games made by independent and large studios around the world.

Rudi said that the game industry was promising enough to make money because game portals would share advertising and virtual goods revenues with game developers. If the games got millions of plays, their owners could receive sponsorship opportunities.

Unlike Rudi, Ibrahim and Jefvin uploaded their games onto Android'€™s Google Play and Microsoft'€™s Windows Store. He advised game developers to have accounts to upload their games.

'€œIt is free of charge to sign up in Store. However, in Google, we have to pay US$25,'€ he said, adding that he had created 11 free-to-play games, including Eyes and Squad that had been downloaded by more than 5,000 and 10,000 times respectively from Google Play.

Jefvin and Ibrahim said that they did not mind if their games were downloaded for free because they were made for improving their skills as game designers instead of for profit.

They said that if they wanted to make money, they could provide digital content that gamers could buy through In-App Purchase or they could open advertising spaces by teaming up with mobile ad platforms, such as AdMob, VserV and iAd.

'€œ[In Google Play], 70 percent of the income will come to us [game developers], while 30 percent goes to Google,'€ Jefvin said.

Jefvin agreed with Rudi that the game industry had a promising market because games were always available in smartphones, the users of which kept increasing around the globe.

In the country, in 2013, the number of Android and iOS users, respectively, reached 11.8 million and 380,000, up from 2.1 million and 70,000 in 2011, according to data provided by International Data Corporation (IDC) Indonesia.

According to the latest report published by Google Indonesia and Gesellschaft fur Konsumforschung (GfK), in Indonesia, smartphone penetration reached 43 percent this year, up from 28 percent last year.

With 2,500 respondents who have smartphones in big cities in the country, 61 percent of them used their phones for approximately 5.5 hours every day and they opened 46 different applications, including games, the report revealed.

Ibrahim and Jefvin said that although they were not the first winner of the AYCIF, they would not give up and would join more competitions in future.

'€œBecoming the winner is not our focus. We just hope that our studio will develop and we can hire more people to work with us,'€ said Rudi.

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