Southeast Asian-rooted,
Stockholm-based.
Making games,
making moves.

Joining a team with low morale and dysfunctional management is a nightmare scenario for any producer. When I joined the Central Tech team at Avalanche Studios — 20+ engineers spanning animation, audio, graphics, physics, runtime, and more — that's exactly what I walked into. The team had a reputation for being difficult to work with, communication between the engine team and game projects was fractured, and cohesion was low.

What I did

I didn't fix it by following a playbook. I identified what needed solving first, then introduced adaptive project management techniques designed specifically for a team resistant to change. I kept the agile principles that mattered and threw out what didn't — building a version of Scrum that actually fit the people, not the other way around. Worked with seasoned engineers, principals, and make the team see things in one vision to commit together, and start thinking holistically. Not just about the engine, but the game and the company vision as a whole.

The result

The team that once struggled to deliver became a unified unit producing meaningful results. Two Technical Directors from separate game projects gave direct shoutouts on how communication between Central Tech and their teams had transformed. One engineer told me I'd helped them build the right feature — and genuinely made them excited about it. This experience became the foundation of my talk "Turning the Tide" — selected for the Gamescom Asia x Thailand Game Show 2025 conference in Bangkok.

AccelByte builds the backend infrastructure that powers live games — and for four years, I was at the centre of making that infrastructure work for some of the industry's biggest names.

Enterprise Client Partnerships

I managed technical partnerships with studios including Warner Bros Games, Bandai Namco, Remedy and Starbreeze — overseeing backend integration and live ops support for Payday 2, integration for Payday 3, and contributing to the creation of Starbreeze Nebula. I also worked with FuzzyBot, a small indie studio backed by Dreamhaven. Navigating the needs of a scrappy indie alongside enterprise giants taught me that great partnership management is fundamentally about understanding context, not just delivering features.

Shipping Games Across Platforms

I produced two demo games — one in Unity, one in Unreal Engine 4 — shipped across Steam, Epic Games Store, Xbox Series X, and PS4. Getting them across the finish line on four platforms simultaneously required tight coordination across engineering, QA, and publishing.

SDK Development & Mentorship

I oversaw the delivery of multiple SDKs (Unity, Unreal Engine, Golang, and Python) acting as both Technical Producer and Product Owner. Beyond delivery, I owned the documentation strategy, gatekeeping quality and ensuring every SDK was properly documented. The most rewarding part? The team delivering much of this was mostly juniors and interns. Watching them ship real, production-grade work was the kind of outcome that makes the job meaningful.

When I joined AccelByte, the company had around 20–30 employees and a dream to build backend infrastructure for games. When I moved on from this role, that number was closer to 110. I helped build that team — not just by finding people, but by deciding what kind of company AccelByte would become.

Hiring Against Giants

We were competing for the same engineers as Tokopedia, Shopee, Gojek, and various Indonesia's best-funded unicorns — and we couldn't match their salaries. So I changed the pitch: radical honesty about where AccelByte was, the challenges, the ambitions. That honesty became our greatest recruiting asset.

Hiring for Growth, Not Just Performance

I made a deliberate choice to prioritise growth mindset and culture fit over raw performance. I rebuilt our recruitment processes from scratch — redesigning how we talked to candidates, how we received them during onsite visits, and how we assessed them. This is where I first realised I was thinking like a Product Owner.

Legacy

One hire I'm particularly proud of: a Technical Writer I encouraged to explore product and project management. He made the switch, became one of AccelByte's best Technical PMs to this day, and eventually took over some of my own client relationships after I left.

Taking the Shot

When I was ready to move into production, I reached out directly to the CEO, learned to code overnight to demonstrate technical capability, and made my case. He said yes.

I didn't come from a games education. I didn't come from a tech background. I grew up in Semarang, Central Java, and nobody around me looked like someone who would end up managing AAA game engine engineers in Stockholm. That's exactly why I speak.

Southeast Asia is one of the most creative, most energetic, and most underestimated regions in the global games industry. The talent is there. The passion is there. What's often missing is the confidence — the belief that someone like you, from a place like yours, can build a career and a business in games.

I was invited to speak at the IGDX Roadshow in Yogyakarta, Indonesia in 2022, where I spoke on "Building a Sustainable Business in the Indonesian Game Industry." It wasn't just a talk about strategy — it was a message to every person in that room who wondered whether they were allowed to dream this big.

You are. I didn't come from game or tech education either. And I intend to keep showing up in Southeast Asia — on stages, in conversations, and eventually through what I build.