The BaliFied game development story part 2

For you who followed the blog ‘From Bali with Love – The BaliFied game development story part 1’ here comes the second part! This time we decided to change things around and my wife Joan has written this part.
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The Situation
My husband keeps on surprising me. After reading his blog about the BaliFied game development, it reminded me of what a big achievement he already gained this far: starting up a new company and this time, with his wife instead of business partners. I can assure you that it’s a whole different experience to work together with your better half! As two founders of Dragon Game Studio, we are together 24/7 business wise and outside… I honestly think that not a lot of couples choose this lifestyle, knowing how much (extra) headache it can add. But somehow it works for us. As long as we keep the patience and a positive attitude by always listen to each other’s opinion, we’re fine ☺
 
​On the work floor I let my husband run the show and I’m there to stand by with my opinion and advice. I’m sharing my thoughts with the team on the projects and I keep myself busy with social media, other aspects of online marketing and game research. Yes, playing Clash of the Clans is game research haha… This position is completely new to me. I have a Bachelor in Marketing Communication and had several positions in that field. I also had many different jobs in all kinds of other industries. But being CEO at the present time wasn’t really a choice, but rather something for me to do. Besides standing by my husband during this new adventure of ours, it’s not only fun, it also gives me the freedom I need to prepare for the lifestyle of my role as Mum-to-be, which will be in a couple of months…

The Team
I’ll tell you a bit about how we managed to gather our talented team. We are now with 8 people (including ourselves): Five full time staff and one intern. All are highly educated young Indonesians. The first one that joined us, turned out to be the person we bought one of our dogs from. He had similar interests, a matching education and… he was looking for a job. Surprising how paths can cross!

After some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) by Jonas, other serious, qualified and experienced candidates found their way to Dragon Game Studio’s website. The applicants were willing to move from all over of Indonesia to start their new adventure with us in Bali. I guess we have that in common with our team: we attract people with a great spirit, who dare to be adventurous, go with their gut feeling of what feels right and simply do what makes life FUN. Working on something that’s fun is hardly called work, right?

We took the second potential candidate very seriously since he had worked at Gameloft, a big international game company. We flew together with my brother who was visiting us back then, and with our first employee to Surabaya for an interview. As we hoped for, everything went very well and we came to a mutual agreement. He is now our Art Director. I feel extremely lucky that things turned out the way they did for us, so far… The Dream Team was completed not long after we found our Art Director and here we are now: a full team including two Programmers, both already living in Bali, our Art Director and Studio Manager/Game Designer, who are both from Surabaya and a Graphic Designer from Tasikmalaya.

I believe it’s very important to build a good relationship with your team. To gain and build mutual respect and make it possible to work every day on a game that everybody is happy with. Our motto is “Life is Wonderful, let our games be part of it” and that being said, we try to create a good environment for the team at the office with a gaming room, latest consoles and game releases. From time to time we also organize karaoke nights, snorkel trips, have some Bintangs, grab a movie together, etcetera. We treat them like family and they do the same with us.

The Development
I can’t write too much about game development itself, since I’m really a noob here so forgive me if the description’s a bit poor… here’s what I can tell you about BaliFied: it’s being developed with Corona SDK. Corona is an awesome software development kit that can easily implement all the features and gameplay that we wanted for BaliFied. The programming language that Corona uses is LUA, and was very easy for our programmers to understand and learn. We were off to a flying start just a week after our senior programmer joined us! The only reason it has taken us 3 months to get where we are today is because both my husband and I are perfectionists, and insisted on changing the GUI (Graphical User Interface) many times. With that said, we are now more than happy with the current GUI & it’s soon time to pick up the BaliFied development again. We took a few weeks break from it to do something else for a while. That resulted in our other upcoming game Don’t Steal My Banana which is finished now and will be released in the middle of March 2013.

I learned that, with my zero background in game development, all you need to do is to gather the right people, with the right skills and let them work their magic! Sometimes when we are discussing things and the guys throw in some terms I never heard about before, I just nod my head and a minute later I am Googling to find out exactly what they were talking about 

As Jonas told you in the previous blog post, BaliFied is based on the old board game ‘Bali’ from MB. We gave it a huge twist by improving the game rules, made it visually attractive by adding backgrounds that highlight Bali’s characteristics, added special actions that will make the gameplay even more exciting & turned it into a social game which gives the user the possibility to play against anyone in the world.

If one day you will come and visit Bali, you are welcome to step by our studio and meet the Dragon Dream Team that I’m so proud of.

With our two upcoming games, BaliFied and Don’t Steal My Banana we hope to entertain the casual gamers of all ages coming from Bali, further and beyond….

Thanks for your time to read this, and on behalf of our entire team, many thanks for your support and spreading the love.

Read more about our projects on Facebook and Twitter and feel free to like and/or follow us:

www.facebook.com/BaliFied
www.twitter.com/BaliFiedTheGame
www.dragongamestudio.com

Wishing you a wonderful time where ever you are, and keep smiling.

​ Joan Johnsson
Founder & CEO