How a Student Mobile Game Community Achieves Hundred of Thousands of Downloads

I stumbled upon Amikom Game Dev when I was looking around the Google Play store’s ‘top new free’ section. I noticed there was a game named Ular Tangga by Amikom Game Dev sitting in second place. As I dug deeper, I found out that the team has produced several titles, gaining hundreds of thousands of downloads in total.

I got in touch with Agoestri Hariyanto, a founder and community leader of Amikom Game Dev. He was kind enough to explain more about the community. He says it was founded in January 2012 by several students at STMIK Amikom Yogyakarta University. Yogyakarta itself is well known in Indonesia’s tech scene for its rich base of game developers.

Currently Amikom Game Dev has around 80 active members, distributed among seven developer teams, one events organizer team, and several management teams. Although the community is relatively new, it is very productive in creating games. Here are three of the top games that they’ve already published in Google Play:

1. Panjat Pinang

We reviewed this game earlier this year. Panjat Pinang is a digital version of the traditional Indonesian game in which players climb a pole made out a Pinang tree to grab prizes that are hung at the top of the pole. According to Google Play stats, the game has been downloaded between 100,000 and 500,000 times.

2. Jumping Granny

Jumping Granny does not have huge download numbers like Panjat Pinang, but it has 5,000 to 8,000 downloads, which is by no means easy to achieve.

3. Ular Tangga

Ular Tangga is Indonesian for “snakes and ladders.” Obviously, the gameplay follows the traditional game of that name. Like Panjat Pinang, Ular Tangga has gained some popularity, racking up somewhere between 100,000 and 500,000 downloads.

I tried the game. What I found interesting is that the game offers multiplayer mode with different handsets connecting via bluetooth. Combined with its feature that requires users to shake the handset to roll the dice, I got my siblings playing this and we had a laugh. We all looked a little crazy repeatedly shake our phones. The game has decent graphics, although I wouldn’t call it outstanding overall.

What’s Next?

For a student community, in which they all work part-time on developing the games, I found its productivity to be outstanding. The afore-mentioned games were built by a team consisting of six to eight students. Hariyanto added that this is just the beginning for Amikom Game Dev, as the community is preparing to hold an event on October 12 and 13. It plans to launch eleven new game titles that the community members have been working on for the past four months – as well as one board game. The event will also provide a 24-hour hackathon to develop a game from scratch and a seminar on game development. We look forward to seeing what they create next.