Game developers endure trolls, tough parents
THOSE who dream of working in the video game industry face a number of challenges, including dealing with people who don’t consider it a promising career.
But some local video game developers have found success and have made Indonesia a force to be reckoned with in the global video game landscape, all while battling the doubts of family members.
Syahroni “Roni” Musthofa is an indie game developer who works two jobs, one as a game programmer for Alegrium – a Jakarta studio known for its Icon Pop Quiz series – and the other as an independent developer of his own games.
“During my school days, I programmed games mostly as a hobby or in competition for prizes,” Roni said. Then, he read an article about
Legacy: Tale of the Fatebounds, a role-playing game in the Japanese style developed by Indonesian studio Semisoft.
Roni was so taken aback that a local studio had made such a complete and globally recognised game that he left “a wall of text (filled with) feedback on the (studio website’s) comments section”.
Roni recalled, laughing, that he joined the company a few months after posting his comments, and he began carrying out the changes he had proposed.
Making games as a student and building a network in the industry led to a full-time job.
“My mother didn’t complain so much when I was making games while studying. My grades were good. It was even better that I was making money by myself,” Roni said. But as he moved on to making games full-time, “the ‘noise’ started”, Roni said, referring to his mother’s complaints.
Even as his steady income made him the backbone of his family, Roni’s mother kept on pushing him to find a “real job”.
Despite that, he never gave up trying to explain what his job was to his mother.
“The pandemic actually showed my family how lucrative the video game industry is,” Roni said.
As many people lost their jobs, Alegrium continued to thrive, mostly because more people were playing video games as they spent more time at home. — The Jakarta Post/ ANN