It all began with a controller or a keyboard. Ever since our countrymen picked up these contraptions, we’ve been joining insurgent factions and counter-terrorist forces, commanding humans in space to build bases and settlements, ganging up on ziggurats and creeps blocking the way to the Frozen Throne, stealing mushrooms from a farm to become a member of a guild of thieves or exorcising ghosts with an antique camera.

The past decade saw a boom in our local video game culture. In a country where every Internet café is a home for young video game players, there’s always one or two who think to themselves, “Hey, why don’t we make one?”

Out of the shadows

“I became a game developer because I want to tell stories,” shares Vincent Layog, a student from the De La Salle College of Saint Benilde studying game development and design. “I love building worlds and characters, then giving people the freedom to explore the intricacies of both.”

Enthralled by the wonderfully crafted worlds, compelling narratives and characters that many video games boast, a number of Filipinos have banded together to create their own video game experiences.

As the forerunners of this movement, Anino Entertainment was the first video game-developing group in the country. They created a game called Anito: Defend a Land Enraged (2003), which has a point-and-click dungeon crawler gameplay inspired by that of Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo series.

Anito deals with Filipino mythology and an alternate history of the country. Not only do players get to fight off foreign invaders, but they hack, slash and blast their way through monsters from local lore: The tikbalang, kapre, manananggal and many others. The game grabbed an award for its sound design in the 12th Independent Games Festival in 2004, and no local video game developer today has come close to recreating its success.

Hard being easy

Anino Entertainment set the bar for local video game developers with its complexity, but other gamers or developers find beauty in the opposite. Take Temple Run, Angry Birds or even Flappy Bird—their stories (if there are stories at all) are not necessarily compelling; if anything, their concepts are ridiculous. But they’re wildly successful, bringing us to the question: How the hell do these developers do it?

“There are just so many things that have to be done: From designing systems to creating the art assets, the programming and implementation,” explains Layog. Given the grand and detailed world of video games, we can only begin to imagine what the daunting work would be like.

“First step in developing a video game is to have a solid game concept,” shares Erich Vicerra, a game developer and an assistant professor from the Finance and Accounting Department. Once the team finalizes the concept, they’ll have to deal with the basics, such as characters, gameplay mechanics, art style—and that’s just the conceptualization stage.

After brainstorming, the team has to start building the game itself. This is where the programmers, designers, writers and all the other team members really put their skills to work. “The programmers will code the game while the artists will draw the graphics. The game designer, on the other hand, must facilitate to make sure the game stays true to his vision,” Vicerra elaborates.

“It’s really hard, especially if everyone is not fully committed to the game,” says Vicerra. He notes that despite working with friends, they are having a hard time developing their games because of their own obligations outside of game developing. AJ Elicaño (BFA CW/AB IS ‘14) experiences similar problems. His game developing team, Marvin, is currently working on a point-and-click adventure game under the same name. Similar to Vicerra, Elicaño only moonlights as a developer.

As the writer for his team’s video game, Elicaño sees his task as a major challenge. “In creative writing, most of what we write has a definite page order; you read page one before page two, and so on. But here, a player can go [through the game] in different orders, or click on objects in different sequences, and that would change the order in which the narration got presented to them.”

Passion play

“I had fun when I managed to develop my first game for a school project for physics class,” says Vicerra. “The sense of joy I experienced is really worth the effort of spending three days just coding the game.”

Despite, or perhaps because of, all the grueling hours put into developing these games, the community is a tight-knit one. “We developers support each other in small ways—liking and sharing our promotions on social networking sites,” says Layog. “Being a game developer isn’t your typical job in this country. The community is small, so everyone is supportive. We’re like a big family.”

The Game Developers Association of the Philippines is testament to that sense of family. Formed in 2007, the organization is the representative group for the country’s game development industry, seeking to aid and promote local game developers.

For Layog, the difficulties that come with being a part of this small, but passionate community matter little. To him, game development is about fulfilling dreams. “I've always dreamed of working on a massively multiplayer online game. [Building] a persistent world where people can interact and play together—leveling or questing, shopping and socializing—like a massive game of Dungeons and Dragons.”

Over the years, Filipinos have explored countless virtual worlds—controllers in hand, fingers dancing across keyboards. Today, a brave few are making the shift from adventurers to world-builders themselves—and the future of local gaming couldn’t be more exciting.

Updated on November 6, 2014 at 6:01 PM.