Zeenoh Games: what’s it like to be a small indie game developer in the Philippines

Zeenoh Games is a Philippine indie studio that develops games for iOS, Android, and web browser platforms. Just like any other game development company, it had to start somewhere. More often than not, companies are built on dreams, and Zeenoh Games is no different. Well, maybe it’s a little different: it literally came from a dream.

Once upon a dream: the creation of Zeenoh Games

In the Philippines, a lot of people still believe that dreams have meaning and that interpreting and following them could lead to something fruitful. In 2008, Jhondie ‘JD’ Abenaza had a dream that he was soaring across a vast landscape. He saw the Chocolate Hills of Bohol, children playing patintero, pagodas, ninjas, a futuristic city, hot air balloons, and a dragon, to name a few. At some point in the dream, he found himself being chased by a question mark, which eventually caught up to him and resulted to a large explosion.

In the wake of the explosion were floating letters, which Abenaza realized spelled out the word ‘Zeenoh’. (Today, an image of the landscape he saw in his dream now covers a whole wall in the Zeenoh studio, and is the first thing you will notice when you enter the room.)

Abenaza decided to set up Zeenoh in 2008 after having his dream; he had already been interested in game development and he took this vivid dream as a sign that he should dive in. The initial research and development were very challenging because resources for game development weren’t as abundant then as they are today. Game development was also not a popular industry in the Philippines and it was quite difficult to find game programmers. Even with the presence of the internet, the network for sharing ideas was barely there, so the search for resources, techniques, and concepts was harder than it is today.

Abenaza turned to open source materials and made use of what was available to him until Zeenoh Games was able to release its first game, Numvaders, in 2009. It was not successful. The devices and platforms for game development began to change, so instead of updating the game, Zeenoh decided to make more games.

The Zeenoh Games journey

Patintero Play Time was the first Filipino-themed game in the Google App Store. Although it was first released in 2010, the game only gained popularity sometime around 2013 with 100,000 downloads for both iOS and Android. And although it didn’t become as popular as the Plants vs. Zombies series or Flappy Bird, Abenaza is confident that it resulted to something positive.

It’s a success in that we make a dot in the universe. That’s what’s important. That we already have an identity. [A concept] that we didn’t copy. For us, it’s one legacy.