On this blog post, I am going to share the story behind the development of "Si Juki: Warteg Mania" or The Juki: Food Stall Mania game. "Si Juki" is a fictional character created by Indonesia comic artist, Faza Meonk. Si Juki is very popular in Indonesia. Start from a comic book, and now they even have their big-screen movies. How do I get the deal to work with Faza and his IP, Si Juki? I think it all started back in 2013. I've been a friend with Faza since junior high school, and we lived in the same area. Once we met, I know he's been making a very cool character and very open to collaboration. We tried to create a game called Juki The Scavenger, which aligns with his latest comic book. But due to our busy schedule, both my company and his, this project is abandoned. This problem is also going to be our homework to re-released Juki The Scavenger soon. There's a lot of Juki's comic reader looking at this game once they read the issue about the game on the comic book.

Move forward to 2017. Line Corporation invited me to a meeting. Line is a social media application similar to WeChat or Whatsapp. They have a publishing program for the local game and invited my company, Arsanesia, to join the program. Since this game will be very Indonesian-based, I had an idea to also collaborate with local IP to make the impact bigger. A combination within Line, Pionicon (the IP management behind si Juki), and Arsanesia would make an excellent outcome. And why stop there? Let's invite more developers to join this collaboration, so there will be more knowledge to gain. So I announced in my circle to have one game developer to join this collaboration. That's when I joined forces with a veteran from Surabaya, iPlayAllDay studio. So the composition would be Arsanesia will handle the product and business development also the art of the game, iPlayAllDay will manage the tech and game design, Pionicon will provide the creative and marketing push, and Line Indonesia will help to publish this game with all of their resources.

After the team was assembled, we kickstart the project. I remember flying to Surabaya to meet up with Yanuar from iPlayAllDay to discuss the concept of the game. We discuss the core mechanic of the game, which a combination of a time-management and idle-clicker game. I learned a lot from Yanuar on how to concept a game. He has been in the game industry for more than ten years. There's a lot of things that we learn from him. We researched on the art style for the game that would fit the Si Juki market segmentation. We also tried to list down all of the joke-style Si Juki use every day. Si Juki is very popular among college students, so we chose to make the theme that is familiar with college live in Indonesia. Warteg or food stalls on the street are the main destinations for college students to eat because of the low price and significant portion. We iterated the concept of the game until early 2018. We had the prototype ready and a vertical slice to present to Line Indonesia. But unfortunately, the publishing program for a local game in Indonesia is canceled. We already had a quite fresh concept of the game, and we believe this game has potential. So we decided to keep developing the game even though without support from Line Indonesia anymore.

For validating our game, we showcased the early stage of the game on many occasions. One of the biggest exhibitions is at Bekraf Game Prime, an event for Indonesia Game Developer to showcase our product and got validated by more than 25.000 visitors. We tried to implement as much feedback as possible to make the game more fun. We also attempted to validate the game overseas. We got nominated as Indie Prize Award from Casual Connect Asia in Shenzen, China. We got an opportunity to open a booth and showcased our game. We got tremendously positive feedback and various publishing opportunities. After that, we also got a free booth to showcase the game at the Game Connection America in San Francisco, California. We this positive reception, we are very confident in moving forward to developing this game.

In the last phase of this game development, we faced a challenge. This game is developed using our own funds. So either Arsanesia and iPlayAllDay had to burn their savings to be able to involve in this project. And to be able to do that, we need to have other projects going on for the cash cow. Arsanesia is quite lucky because we have a VC supported our company. But for iPlayAllDay, they have to juggle with other projects. It's getting harder for them to spend more resources on the development of the game. So we did the final push at Bekraf Game Prime 2019. We soft-launched version 1.0 at the event. And after that, the future development of Si Juki: Warteg Mania will be handle by Arsanesia. We are totally aware that for a mobile game, the real "battle" will be after the launch. So giving full control for creative and development to a single studio would make the development phase faster. And the game itself already had a solid core mechanic, so it would help our team moving forward.

After the soft-launching phase, we got our numbers report. Especially the retention and conversion rate. We found some major bugs, even a game-breaking one that makes users uninstalled the game. One thing that is the nightmare for every game programmer is that when you need to modify someone else source code. Event there's a saying that it will be better to write from scratch than to continue some else work. After calculating everything, we try to refactor the source code and try to work some features from the ground up. We make a huge plan to release a major update, version 1.1. We make sure the game is more stable, we changed and added features to improve the retention and conversion rate, and we also add more mechanic into the game. Now version 1.1 is live, and we are very proud of the result so far. We are already working on version 1.2. After this, we will try to port the game to another platform. Today, it's still available only for Android and in Bahasa Indonesia. Once we are confident with the near update, we will port this so more users can play the game.

I'm also curious about bringing the game into the PC market. This type of game maybe works for a PC game. The PC market is an entirely new area for us, who has been doing mobile game since 2011. But we saw an opportunity to jump into the market and want to validate the game for different platforms. Hopefully, the PC version of the game can hit the store really really soon :) Wish us luck.