“Boom!”

Explosions cover your screen as robots armed with rocket launchers and heavy machine guns pound away at each other. 

The intensity of the fight and the complex strategies involved keep you engrossed. It would be easy to assume that such a game came from a large, established studio like Blizzard, for example. 

Take a closer look at the credits, though, and you’ll realize that the game, Kriegsfront Tactics, was made by a small developer that’s a little closer to home.

Meet Indonesian gaming studio Toge Productions. 

“We want to show that developers from Indonesia can make games as well,” says Kris Antoni Hadiputra, CEO and co-founder of Toge Productions.

Press to start 

In 2009, Hadiputra was just a fresh university graduate when his friend asked him to make a game for a competition. Hadiputra was up for the challenge, and the pair worked together over several weekends creating Flash games. 

“We didn’t win [the competition], but we did realize that there’s an opportunity to make Flash games,” Hadiputra says. “We quit our jobs and started making games from then on.”

The two co-founders worked on creating several more titles, with the goal of putting Indonesia on the map for game development. This is something that Toge is well on its way to achieving: Its releases have received “overwhelmingly positive” reviews on Steam and some, like Coffee Talk, have also won several awards. 

Many of the company’s early games were action-based, centered around fighting zombies, and were made using the Flash platform. Things changed around 2016, when many web browsers winded down support for Flash games, prompting the firm to expand its repertoire.