Toekang IT

Indonesian mobile game developer wins code competition

Oct 20, 2006 14:24

Ah, yes. This is another good news. Clickgamer.com and Elements Interactive recently announced Max Studio, an ambitious mobile game studio based in Jakarta, Indonesia, as the grand prize winner of the The Cutting Edge Coding Competition 2006.

Burning Armor Code E, the name of the game, wins a two-year Edge license, an iPod Video and US$5,000 worth of free advertising at Clickgamer.com to promote the winning game.

Max Studio is a company incorporated by a group of Indonesian young people who posseses a strong dream and vision. Each team member has experienced professional training in their respective fields. The game development team itself consists of three programmers and two designers. They are Eric Gunawan, Kukuh Wicaksono, Ricky Suryo Utomo, Hartono Widodo and Alex Sukandar. They are also supported by some freelancers and part-timers.

Max Studio full team

Wicaksono told me that there are two versions of the game: Paid and free. This paid version will be offered in online retail shops such as clickgamer.com, handango.com and pocketgear.com. "We also plan to release the free version for the public as long as we get sponsorship to cover our development costs," he said.

Screenshot

The coding competition, which started early December 2005 and closed August 31 this year, attracted a lot of registrants. Dozens of professional mobile game studios, students, hobbyist programmers and code hackers from literally every continent of the world participated in the competition.

The competition required every submission to be a game of any genre created using the Edge SDK, built for at least two different platforms.

Screenshot

According to Wicaksono, Edge is the most powerful, true multi-platform game engine for mobile devices. The Edge platform, written from scratch in C++, enables you to produce high-quality commercial games.

Screenshot

Compile and create multi-platform games smoothly through the generic interface for a Windows desktop, Windows Mobile Pocket PC up to Windows Mobile 5.0, Windows Mobile Smartphone, Symbian UIQ 2.1 and 3.0, Symbian Series 60 up to third edition, Symbian Series 80, Symbian Series 90 and Gamepark Holdings GP2X console.

This is what the Edge said about Max Studio's winning game:

The winning submission, Burning Armor Code E, is a fast-paced shoot-'em-up space shooter and features eight levels of increasing difficulty filled with enemies, mini and end bosses. Scrolling backgrounds, particles and other visual effects give the player a real arcade gaming experience.

Burning Armor Code E uses lots of Edge's fancy blitting effects and other powerful features such as the native PNG loader, fast pixel-based collision detection, rotated blitting, Edge's built-in timers and compressed packages.

Gunawan, development leader at Max Studio, revealead that they were familiar with the Edge's engine. "It took us about three months to develop the game itself and about a month for testing and quality assurance."

Prior to the submission, for testing purposes, they asked their colleagues in Max Forum and Max Blog to comment and report errors on the game. Yeah, they utilized the "networking" nicely to prepare for this great job.

Two thumbs up, guys!

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