They’ve got game

OKAY, I’ll admit the nubile, spear-wielding amazon dressed in loincloth got my attention.

After all, she was the most attractive among the enthusiasts dressed as Sauron, the Witch King, Neo, Darth Maul, and Frodo Baggins at the 2nd Annual Sci-Fi and Fantasy Convention last January.

Her name was Maya. Unlike the other “cosplayers” (short for costume players), she was the only locally created character. Even more intriguing, she came right out of a computer game.

I followed Maya to the booth of Anino Entertainment, a local game company. There I learned that Anino was put together by a small group of friends led by Niel Dagondon, a computer science graduate from De La Salle University.

Their first major offering was “Anito: Defend a Land Enraged,” the first commercial PC adventure game made in the Philippines.

“Anito” tells the story of Maya and Aguila, children of an influential tribal leader who goes missing in the mythical land of Maroka in 16th Century Asia. Local players will quickly recognize the setting.

“Maroka is an island besieged by internal conflict and armored invaders from a faraway land who are slowly turning Maroka into their monarch’s colony,” says the brief description on the company’s website (http://www.aninoentertainment.com). Instead of the Spaniards, Anito gives us the Senastille, and instead of the Chinese, we get the Kongsun. There are also natives who accept the Senastille, and those who oppose them. The historical models are unmistakable.

At the Anino booth, a member of the team, Luna Cruz, gave me a review copy of the game, which sells for P750 locally or $20 for buyers outside the Philippines. I was impressed. The full-color box and CD sleeve were slick and well designed, and the manual was easy to follow.

But the best surprise came when I installed the game and played it. I found it engaging, well-written and addictive—winning qualities in a computer game.

In game parlance, Anito is a role-playing game (RPG), which means you become one of the protagonists. In this case, you can choose to be Aguila or Maya, and the story will unfold differently depending on whom you choose to play. This is an interesting departure from most RPGs, where the choice of a character’s sex has little effect on the storyline.

Maroka is a huge world, and I was amused by the familiar objects I found while exploring it—lanzones, an itak, and kutsinta, just to name a few. I even killed my first tikbalang, a native horse demon.

The graphics are good, though inconsistent. The music and sound are first rate. Best of all, the writing and storyline are a cut above the usual hack-and-slay adventures. All these make you want to play the game “just a few minutes more”—way past midnight.

Intrigued by the company that created the game, I e-mailed some questions to Gabriel Dizon, a level designer at Anino.

The game business, after all, is a tough one, even in the States. How could an upstart Filipino company survive?

“The game industry is booming worldwide,” Dizon wrote."More and more people are playing games, and the industry is starting to come out of its geeky shell and be recognized as a mainstream medium and even an art form. Because of this, there are many opportunities for people around the world to create their own games.”

Internet connectivity, he adds, means any group with a decent product has a chance to get its game known worldwide.

“Our company plans to survive in this business by innovating, and leading the way for our country to become one of the game development hubs in the world,” Dizon says. “We also plan to attack the industry much like the mainstream IT industry, by offering world-class quality at rates that the other First World countries cannot match. We expect other aspiring Filipino developers to come out with their own games, and frankly we can’t wait to play other Filipino-made games!”

The challenges are considerable, however.

For example, Dizon notes that Anito doesn’t even come close to 10 percent of the development budget of most games released nowadays. “Games in the US cost between $2 million and $7 million to produce, and that doesn’t even include their huge advertising cost to hype the game,” Dizon says. “We’re working with a much, much smaller budget.”

As an independent game producer, Anino banks heavily on its website to promote and sell its products.

Through partners abroad, Anito is now available in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Luxemburg, Norway, Sweden and the UK. At home, it’s sold close to 3,000 copies—no mean feat in a market where 90 percent of the games being played are pirated.

Starting out in a garage-type environment, the Anino team had to do everything from scratch. That meant writing its own game engine—the software nuts and bolts of a computer game. The team also had to learn 3D graphics and animation techniques along the way.

“Anito was started in October 2001. We finished the game almost exactly two years later, in October 2003,” says Dizon. “Game development cycles don’t get any shorter. Games just get more and more ambitious and there are so many new technologies to implement that games are actually taking longer to produce. It’s no different for us—our next game has to be better than Anito in all aspects, and the time it would take to do that would be the same or longer than development of Anito.”

So what’s next?

“We have a few game concepts in the works, but we can’t tell anyone about them yet,” Dizon says. “But we definitely won’t limit ourselves to the ethnic Asian theme. There are so many worlds to explore, and Maroka is just one of them.”

Fair enough. I can wait. In the meantime, I don my loincloth and set forth again in search of the missing Datu. Just a few minutes more.