Level Up KL 2022 noticed a bunch of Malaysia’s brightest expertise take the stage and provides some particular perception into the world of gaming, simply two of those individuals had been Virtuos Kl General Manager Mufizal Mokhtar and Technical Arts Director Johaness Reuben.

Mufizal Morktar labored at Ubisoft Singapore for over 10 years earlier than returning residence to steer Virtuos KL and create some nice sculptures of Royal Selangor. Johaness Reuben labored for 11 years as a recreation artist and later technical artwork director within the native recreation studio GameBrains.

Both are veterans of the native business trying to train and help the subsequent technology of recreation builders by the just lately opened Virtuos KL. Here is what they needed to say within the interview.

Mobile, Console, and The SEA Gaming Market

There’s no denying that inside Malaysia and the remainder of South East Asia, cellular gaming is king. So to begin the interview, we requested the Vortuos duo how console gaming might achieve extra traction within the SEA area. Mufizar began by speaking about what makes the cellular market so widespread in addition to what they themselves are doing to deliver cellular gamers to consoles.

“The reason why it’s big is accessibility. Everybody has mobile phones right now and what the console market is doing right now is creating a lot more accessibility to let people get into video games. So now, you see a lot of partnerships between console games and mobile games to try and get people into consoles but the biggest barrier is, of course, accessibility.”

“In my opinion, to get people to play on consoles, we just need to continue to expose them to different types of games. Consoles have a lot more processing power and you can have versions of your game on mobile and once it’s popular, you can port it over to consoles which is what we are doing as a company. What we do is we port successful games from many different types of platforms into consoles so that the people playing these games can play them on many different types of consoles as well.”

Johannes fast corrected nevertheless that they didn’t port video games, they tailored them: “I’ll add that typically a port means taking and doing a build on another platform but we actually adapt such as going from mouse and keyboard to controller, which means a completely different UI and design, a completely new thing. That’s what we do, we come in a do the adaptation”.

Mufizar says he sees way more of those diversifications coming within the subsequent few years, hopefully bridging the hole between cellular and console avid gamers.

Keeping Malaysian Talent In Malaysia 

A present concern within the Malaysian Gaming Industry is that many younger proficient builders usually want to go away to search out employment in different international locations. We requested them what could possibly be performed to maintain expertise throughout the nation. The query was particularly private as a type of abilities that left included Mufizal himself who went to work at Ubisoft Singapore.

“The topic is pretty close to my heart because I’m one of them. I left the country, but then I came back. I started my career in the video game industry in 2003 and Jo [Johaness] was the one that actually hired me. I worked in the local video game industry for about five years but there wasn’t a lot of opportunity out there.”

“I had no choice but to leave the country to expand my knowledge. Most of the time, people leave because they’ve hit a ceiling and they cannot learn anymore, there’s nowhere to go, and there are no more opportunities in Malaysia for people to better themselves and bring their careers to the next level. That’s what I had to do; I had to leave Malaysia to find more things to learn outside of Malaysia.”

He believes that the best way to maintain expertise, and what Virtuos KL is finally making an attempt to do is to present younger Malaysian builders these alternatives that can enable them to progress additional in a AAA Studio.

“You can grow within Virtuos KL as you’ll be given the opportunity to work on international brands and on complex projects that push your creativity and encourage you to grow as a game developer.”

He additionally identified that Virtuos KL is only one of 16 totally different regional Virtuos workplaces around the globe and that they’ve a system referred to as “missions”. This signifies that in case you work for Virtuos KL, you’ll then get the chance to work in different workplaces in different international locations. This permits builders to work exterior of the nation with out totally disconnecting from Malaysia. They can get hold of new experiences and add to their talent set whereas nonetheless staying in contact with residence.

Preventing Crunch Culture

There are many different issues plaguing online game growth and one among them is crunch tradition. There have been a number of notable instances over time of builders being overworked so we thought to ask what Virtuos discovered to be the simplest approach of stopping crunch.

“When you work in a creative industry, sometimes there will be times when people will be extra passionate about delivering the highest quality possible. There are repercussions to that because sometimes, people do get burnt out, and they do get tired. I think the best way to make sure people don’t get burnt out is to make sure you plan the production properly, ahead of time. You need a very strong production team, and a very strong project management team to make sure it does not happen in the first place. You know what they say, prevention is better than cure.”

He does nevertheless level out that generally a crunch is inevitable and when that occurs, it’s good to compensate individuals accordingly both with time or cash.

“What usually frustrates people is when time is taken away from them. For example, when I’m taking away your time to do my stuff, that’s when you feel frustrated because I want my own time, I want to spend time with my family, I want to spend time with my friends, I want to do my own stuff but I have to work and do stuff for you instead.”

“In order to do that [complete the project] though, sometimes crunch is inevitable, not just in video games but in every creative production process, there will be a time when you’ll need to push the boundary a bit. Unfortunately, when it does happen, the best way to make them feel better about it is to give them back the time that we’ve taken away from them. So, we can do that by giving them extra time off so that they can rest after the overtime or you compensate them with extra pay for the time that they have given. I think that is the best way to do it. Prevent it, and if you cannot prevent it, then compensate them and give them back the time.”

On prime of that Johaness emphasised that they at all times tried to observe every worker’s psychological well being and that they need to really feel secure to speak or complain to the upper administration about any issues they’re having.

“We constantly monitor people’s mental health. We’re always engaging with them and seeing if things are okay. It’s not purely about whether they are able to work but where they are as a person”.

Education

Video recreation growth, after all, begins with training. As such we questioned the Virtuos administration on in the event that they thought Malaysian colleges would quickly undertake topics like laptop science as topics. According to Johaness, they have already got:

“I’ve just met a school that has digital science and natural science starting from Form 1 of lower secondary. If you saw a whole bunch of kids in uniforms running around [Level Up KL 2022], it’s that school. I spoke with the lady [in charge of the kids] and we spoke for a bit. They’re already starting this subject, it’s already happening, and this would definitely get better over time.”

Mufizal nevertheless says that whereas it’s going to occur, you don’t must do comp sci to develop into a recreation developer.

“The short answer is yes. But when it comes to video game development, I think you can apply your life experience to make video games. You don’t have to be a computer scientist to be a game developer, you could be a physicist, you could be an artist. You can be a person that really likes Lego blocks or be an architect.”

“In the future and it’s coming fast I think people will need to understand how technology works in order for them to adapt and express their creative freedom. Back in the 1500s, if you want to express creative freedom, you needed to understand how oil patience works, you needed to understand how brushes worked. Nowadays, we think that’s traditional but back then, that was considered cutting-edge. We may think that they are traditional but I still think that brushes and oil painting are technology and coming forward today, brushes and oil paintings are computers.”

Parents and Video Games

Connecting to training, we requested in the event that they had been seeing Southeast Asian dad and mom’ attitudes to video video games and online game growth as a profession change. Back within the day, all of us heard the well-known “video games will rot your brains” line however with how ubiquitous the medium is, that has to have modified proper? According to the 2 builders, it fortunately appears to be altering.

 “I think so,” says Mufizal. “I think people start to see video games as a viable career choice because the convergence is happening really quickly. I see my friends who are parents early on in their child’s life asking their children questions like “Why are you spending so much time playing video games? Today, they’re like “what kind of games can they play? What kind of games can they play to learn new things and skills?”

“The attitude is definitely changing because developing video games goes beyond just playing games. It’s a study of life, it’s a study of human behavior, it’s a study of many many things. People are coming to understand that video game development is just as important of a career out there and are becoming more open to their kids starting out in this industry.”

Johaness additionally says that this alteration is once more due to the accessibility of cellular video games, noting that “It’s taken 30 years for my mum to figure out what I do but now she knows because she hears video games and says “oh, you mean like Candy Crush?” You discover even those that will not be avid gamers, they could be accountants of their 50s all of a sudden going like “now I understand what this is” and when their child says “I wanna learn this”, they already know. That has actually bridged the data hole and I imagine that’s accessibility. It has actually helped the youthful technology of avid gamers to develop whereas additionally bringing the older technology again in. I strongly imagine the way forward for online game growth is brilliant!”

The Challenge of Finding New Media

We ended our interview by asking Mufizal and Johannes what challenges the Malaysia Video Game business at the moment faces. The two mentioned that at the moment there weren’t many large challenges the business actually confronted, at the least not in contrast to some years in the past. They did nevertheless say that they want for native Malaysian-made video games to be extra current within the media.

“There are a lot of people making really great games but there aren’t enough platforms for them to show off their games. We have a lot of media channels, we have radio channels, and we have national television and I truly hope that these media will start to understand the importance of the video game industry.”

“When I was in Amsterdam, Singapore, and Hong Kong, I’d be in the cinema, and Call of Duty comes up in the cinema ads. I would love for this to be the case in our local cinema, showing off our local content as well. At the end of the day, people don’t get enough visibility for these great games they’re making which then doesn’t push the games to their ultimate success.”

I shouldn’t that I’ve seen adverts for video video games like Demon Slayer: The Hinogami Chronicles and Dislyte within the Kuala Lumpur MRT trains and stations however these aren’t native titles. Perhaps seeing adverts for native video video games would be the subsequent large step.

Virtuos KL

When we requested what made Virtuos KL totally different from all the opposite branches of Virtuos around the globe, Mufizal informed us that they’re finally the identical nevertheless he believes within the Malaysian Games Industry’s uncooked expertise. “I wanted Virtuos to come to KL because I firmly believe that Malaysia has the talent pool that will help further accelerate the growth of the local game development industry and economy.”

After going to Level Up KL 2022, I firmly imagine that as nicely. Walking by the halls of the primary convention room, I used to be handled by so many enthusiastic builders sharing a variety of inventive and revolutionary titles, some I used to be accustomed to others I’d by no means heard of however am now very excited to play extra of. If that is what we’ve to look ahead to, Malaysia’s gaming business actually is brilliant.

We thank Mufizal Moktar and Johaness Rueben from Virtous KL for taking the time to talk with us on this interview and want them to better of luck on their future initiatives.

For extra data on Virtuos KL, take a look at our protection of Mufizal Moktar’s speak on ‘Why Game Developers Matter For Our Digital Future’.