Developer Acceleration Program Spotlight: Gambir Studio

The ID@Xbox Developer Acceleration Program, launched in 2023, marches forth with the mission to empower underrepresented creators with the resources and information needed to bring their creativity, innovation, and originality to Xbox. The Developer Acceleration program seeks to support developers who are led by those from Black, Indigenous, Latino or LGBTQIA+ communities, women, developers with disabilities, developers from emerging markets or teams with unique perspectives, and several other communities by removing longstanding barriers to entry for creators and normalizing diverse storylines and characters in gaming.

Since the program was announced, dozens of games have been released on Xbox to both critical acclaim and commercial success. With that in mind, we believe it is only fitting that we spotlight some of the creators behind these titles in a new recurring series on Microsoft Game Dev blog.

This week, we’re highlighting Gambir Studio, developer of the Developer Acceleration Program title Spices of Life. We had the chance to chat with Shafiq Husein, CEO, about the studio’s experience with the program and how DAP helped them successfully develop Spices of Life.

Tell us about Gambir Studio.

Gambir Studio started as a dream by five friends. My co-founders and I met each other when we were working at another video game company. After work, we’d often hang out to share drinks and stories. Then we discovered that we have the same dream: to create games that we can call our own.

We started making small games after work hours. Our earliest games were based on local trends, but their success made us realize that Indonesians are drawn to games with themes that are familiar to them.

In 2020 we launched our flagship title: Selera Nusantara, a mobile cooking game. The Indonesian food, setting, and story are all a big hit with the players.

Since then, our team has grown to 16 people. In the last few years, we’ve expanded into PC and consoles as well.

But we still keep the same principle: our games must have that unique Indonesian DNA.

What can you tell us about Spices of Life?

Spices of Life is a story about food and family – big parts of Indonesian and South East Asian culture.

It tells the story of a young woman from a small town. As the oldest child, she has to take care of her siblings while also being in charge of cooking. Although she loves cooking, she finds this provincial life too limiting. That’s when she embarks to the big city to join a big cooking competition and pursue her dreams.

Through this story, we want to show the duality of South East Asia attitudes. In small towns, life revolves around the family and community – close-knit, but intrusive. And in the developing metropolis, it’s the opposite: fast-paced and individualistic. We want to share what it feels like to navigate through these contrasting experiences.

Additionally, the main character will use cooking as her way of bridging these ways of life. Each recipe she cooks holds a personal or cultural significance. They will also guide her in her journey to find herself.

For the gameplay, we design it using our years of experience in developing cooking games. We want to make it satisfying, accessible, and informative.

What have been the biggest challenges you’ve faced as an independent studio?

As an independent studio, the biggest challenge is definitely ensuring that our business is sustainable.

We are bootstrapping our operations, meaning we have to be very prudent in our spending. We don’t want to scale up too fast without making sure that we have a solid business plan and healthy financials. We prefer to keep things lean, because it keeps us flexible and it allows our team to learn more.

We’re here for the long run. We want to keep improving our team’s capability. We want to grow our community organically. And most importantly, we want to keep creating games that our players can enjoy.

How did you learn about or connect with the Developer Acceleration Program?

We first learned about the program from the Xbox networking events. It sounded like a great program that supports emerging developers, so we asked around. Some of our fellow Indonesian developers have joined the program previously, and they highly recommend it.

Then I reached out to the Xbox team and was connected with Jun Shen, who’s been a very supportive ally to us South East Asian developers. We corresponded over emails and calls to see if Spices of Life would be a good fit for the DAP. Fortunately, we share a belief in this project’s potential, so we’re now part of the program.

How has the Developer Acceleration Program impacted your game’s development?

First, we get the validation that Spices of Life is an important story to tell and an important game to make. The feedback we got also helped our team to further shape the game to fully realize its potential.

Furthermore, the financial support we get from the program means that we can bring the game to Xbox and Windows without worrying about the resources. As an independent studio, it gives us precious breathing room to move the development along.

What accomplishments are you most proud of as an independent studio?

Last year, we had the honor to be named as Best Indonesian Game Developer at The Lazy Game Awards 2024, the biggest video game awarding event in Indonesia.

We were chosen as the winner among the nominees due to the multiple games we managed to launch in 2024. We experimented with themes, format, genres, and platform – we even launched our first self-published PC game. And one of our 2024 games, Warung Seblak Nusantara, reached 1 million downloads with only organic marketing.

We are so happy that our team can still consistently grow and learn new things. Spices of Life combines the lessons we’ve learned in our journey – a full-length cooking game with a narrative focus for PC and console.

And of course, we are very grateful to have a loyal community of players. Every time we post on social media, our players always leave comments asking for our next game update.

Any hints on what might be coming next from Gambir Studio?

While developing Spices of Life, we also have a smaller side project called KuloNiku. It’s a cooking game with a stylized low-poly art style. KuloNiku is a way for us to iterate on the cooking gameplay while we keep working on the story of Spices of Life to give it the time and effort it deserves.

It represents our effort to keep creating better games by consistently improving in a sustainable way. We believe it’s the best way to bring new, fun, and meaningful experiences to both our loyal fans and new players.

Why do you feel that programs like DAP are important to the health of the game industry?

The video game industry has been getting even more commercialized and centralized in recent years. At the highest level, companies are betting it all on AAA games that require hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of people. Since this is a big bet, companies tend to play safe and make games that they are confident will be a big mainstream hit. I understand that this is almost inevitable due to just how much the biggest companies have grown, but this approach runs the risk of stagnating the medium.

Programs like DAP empowers underrepresented developers like Gambir Studio to create games that are vibrant, soulful, and carry important messages. Our games might not be the shiniest, but we believe it has something different to offer to gamers and the world at large. And we hope these fresh perspectives can eventually help this industry we all love to evolve, thrive, and prosper for years to come.