The School of Digital Media Design from The One Academy held a five-day fun-filled event for students and lecturers to come together and participate in engaging activities outside of their classrooms. Monocon 2022 was organised to bring students from different batches together through games and inspiring talks. Several industry experts were invited to share their experiences throughout their successful careers in the digital media design field with the students, giving them a better understanding of the industry and the career options they can venture into.
One of the guest speakers was The One Academy’s very own alumnus, P’ng Yi Wei, who is the founder and director of Kurechii, an award-winning game studio based in Malaysia. The studio has produced famous games such as Tiny Guardians, The King’s League: Odyssey, Postknight and The King’s League II that have amassed 13.7 million players and counting across the globe. His entire talk revolved around the importance of perseverance when it comes to executing ideas as well as the ups and downs of creating games.
P’ng started off by sharing one of his early works that he created with two of his classmates titled Reachin’ Pichin. It is a platform-jumping game, which became an unexpected hit, garnering over 500,000 players. This newfound success gave him the confidence to pursue his passion in making games full-time. P’ng and his team then came up with a strategy simulation game called King’s League. He planned to finish the entire gameplay in one month since in college it only takes a few weeks to complete projects. However, the process had many trials and errors and it took them over 217 days to completely finish the game. He said it was in that moment where he realised it is not that simple to come up with an entire game from start to finish. Though it took longer than expected, the game received over 3.5 million downloads.
P’ng Yi Wei sharing his advice on the importance of not getting overwhelmed when it comes to creating games for aspiring game developers.
Following this huge success, they created Diggonaut, a mobile arcade game. Unfortunately, it only received around 100 downloads. Without giving up, P’ng and his team came up with Chicky Duo, a point-and-click puzzle game but it only received 2,000 downloads. At this point, he started re-evaluating his decisions, and almost lost interest in creating games. During this time, P’ng said he even stopped playing games because it reminded him too much of their projects that did not make it in the market. Although it was difficult to accept failure, instead of losing hope completely, he decided to try again.
“You become better developers when you create something new, digging things the same way won’t lead to different results,” he said. Realising their mistake of not setting a proper target audience in the previous games, in 2017, Kurechii came up with Postknight. With its adorable characters, amazing gameplay, exciting locations, weaponry and storyline, the game took 8 months to complete. The idea was to create a game that would promote Kurechii. Postknight is a role-playing adventure game where players can fight off enemies, interact with characters and visit cool locations. It received a huge response and to date it has over 5 million downloads. The most exciting part was that it won ‘Best Game’ by Google Play in that year. He talked about how rewarding it was to have gone through a few failed projects and to reach a breakthrough with the team having worked tirelessly to make it happen.
The students who attended the talk found his journey and perseverance inspiring. Of course, his unwavering passion helped shine the way through his darkest moments. Nevertheless, he explained to the students on the importance of never giving up even if the odds are stacked up against them and to keep going. Wrapping up the talk, he left the audience with a piece of advice, “You can’t do something that is completely original in the game industry but you can make it unique,” encouraging students to create games that set them apart from others.
A group photo of The One Academy’s Digital Media Design students together with P’ng Yi Wei.
The One Academy is committed to providing the best art education programmes and continues to nurture its students passionately through its “Masters Train Masters” coaching philosophy, which has been practised for over 30 years, by providing diploma and degree courses in Advertising & Graphic Design, Digital Animation, Digital Media Design, Film Visual Effects, Interior Architecture & Design, Illustration, Fine Arts, Paris Fashion Design & Pattern Making, Computer Science and Game Design. For more information on The One Academy, visit www.toa.edu.my or call +603-7875 5510 or e-mail your enquiries to [email protected].
Online Education Fair 线上教育展
The One Academy of Communication Design
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