Indonesia’s Solite Studio will be heading home as the second place winner at this year’s Microsoft Imagine Cup, a global app competition for students, which was held in Saint Petersburg, Russia, this week. The studio’s award-winning game, Save the Hamsters, had passed the rigorous judging process which took place in two days as the team fielded tests and questions from five judges.
Save the Hamsters had managed to gain 20,000 downloads in the first two weeks of being made available on Windows Phone Store and Windows Store. Solite Studio consists of Asadullohil Ghalib Kubat, Miftah Alfiansyah, Tony Wijaya, dan M. Bagus Muslim, all of which are students at Trunojoyo University in Madura.
After spending one month under the guidance and mentorship of Irving Hutagalung of Microsoft Indonesia and Narenda Wicaksono of Nokia Indonesia, Solite Studio’s Save the Hamsters took second place in the Games category beating competition from around the world. Indonesia has had entries in Imagine Cup for at least seven of the 11 times it’s been held and this is the first time that the candidate has managed to place in the top three on the International stage.
Prior to reaching the International competition in Russia, Solite Studio had previously won the the Games category with XNA API at Lumia Apps Olympiad which was run by Nokia Indonesia back in December 2012, with an educational game called Sakera Math and subsequently winning the Indonesian Imagine Cup competition this year with Save the Hamsters. Both Sakera Math and Save the Hamsters center on learning mathematics by solving puzzles, managing challenges, and getting the right answers to simple math problems.
This year’s Imagine Cup is split into three main categories, Innovation, Games, and World Citizenship with three product-specific challenges and eight sponsor awards. The competition is run by Microsoft for students around the world to get them to create innovative projects using Microsoft’s tools.
The judges who assessed Solite Studio’s handiwork were Adam Sessler of Revision 3, Alexei Pajitnov who created the legendary Tetris game, Microsoft’s Director of Programming for XBox Larry Hryb a.k.a Major Nelson, freelance journalist Laura Parker, and Kevin Dent of Tiswaz Entertainment.
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