This developer made a two-player game so he could spend more time with his son

At Taipei Game Show 2015 we came across an interesting arcade game called Monster Medic. While the premise of the game was not immediately apparent – it was just a gameplay demo – we had a lot of fun playing it.

Monster Medic is a two-player local co-op game where both players need to cooperate in order to pilot a spaceship and fight off enemies. It is under development by TernTek, an independent game studio from Taipei that aims to make games that impact lives.

Later, catching up with its founder Min Tsai via email, Games in Asia learned that Monster Medic was inspired by the birth of Tsai’s son. Tsai says that he was looking forward to spending quality time with the boy, and wanted to play games with him when he got older. However, he feels that competitive play between parents and children can be awkward, so he wanted to create a cooperative game.

“We see a lot of parents so absorbed into their own personal devices and not really paying attention to their children and vice versa,” Tsai says. “TernTek wanted to create a mobile game that connects people in real life.”

That was back in 2013. But Tsai was already running TernTek before that as a solo founder. Its first app, Tacts, was a contact manager for the iPhone. 40-year-old Tsai says that when he got his first iPhone 3G back in 2009, he was annoyed that it didn’t let him organize his contacts into groups. “I had to do this on the computer and sync that configuration back to the iPhone,” he says. “I wanted to do this directly on the iPhone.”

What was simply meant to be a learning experience for Tsai turned into a full app in Tacts. Tsai ended up getting an old friend to help market Tacts, and also received an introduction to TernTek’s visual and UX designer, Annie Lee-Lin. No longer flying solo, Tsai decided that TernTek would make the best possible contact manager it could afford to.

Tacts ended up becoming more than a contact manager. It also included a Top Contact feature that predicted who the user would call depending on the time of the day, their current location, and call frequency. It had a T9 dialer for people who were used to feature phones at that time.

Tacts eventually landed TernTek a contract to design and develop a mobile messaging app. Tsai says that was exhausting, but provided the studio with enough funding to work independently again. But by that time, the team had shrunk once more, with Tsai’s old friend leaving for family reasons. Tsai also found himself unexcited about working on apps.

That was when he started thinking about developing a game. “This was always a dream of mine,” Tsai says, citing how he had considered enrolling in DigiPen after leaving his first job. That was 15 years ago, and he decided it was now or never. He turned to games development together with a 32-year-old artist by the name of Sakami Liao.

L-R: Sakami Liao, Min Tsai.