Images soon!
I never planned on making my own game — it all started when one of my favorite gaming portals shut down.
Back in 2014, I spent countless hours playing WAP games on my phone through a portal called KotaGames. It hosted a huge collection of games, and my personal favorites were Monster Fight Rebirth, Devil Hunter, and Perang Titan. In March 2015, TheMobileGamer (TMG) — the publisher of KotaGames — announced that they would be shutting down the portal and all of its content, explaining that it had become obsolete as the gaming industry shifted toward interactive mobile games (see more).
I was disappointed, but not all was lost. The developer of Perang Titan — Overmobile — had only partnered with TMG to publish the game on KotaGames. They still had their own WAP site, so I could keep playing even after the portal closed.
By 2016, Perang Titan clones were everywhere. I tried many of them and quickly noticed one big difference — the pacing. My hero’s stats grew much faster than in the original, making the experience more exciting. Through VK groups, I discovered numerous clones with similar features, though most didn’t last long. That’s when I thought: why not create my own version in Bahasa?
Not long after, I found a Russian forum sharing the source code for one of these clones. I downloaded it and began figuring out how to run it on my computer, eventually discovering AppServ. At first, I edited the code in plain Notepad before switching to Sublime Text 3, which made the process much easier.
I started by translating the game into Bahasa and learning how the PHP code worked. Then I began adding features from Perang Titan itself to match its user experience — the original clone source was based on an older version and lacked the latest updates. I named my project War of Titans, marked it as “Alpha,” and aimed to compete with other Indonesian clones that already had large player bases.
The challenge was hosting. At the time, I was in my second year of junior high school and had very limited funds. I initially relied on free hosting from Hostinger (which still had a free plan back then), 000webhost, and iFastNet, along with free domains from Freenom. But bandwidth limits quickly became a problem as player activity increased. To solve this, I started saving my pocket money — ten thousand rupiah a month was enough for a shared hosting plan from a reseller. Back then, saving 10k felt like a big deal; now, it feels like pocket change.
When the project entered the beta stage, I decided to rename it to Sword Fight 2. Why “2”? Well… there was never a “Sword Fight 1” — I just thought it sounded cooler that way.
Around this time, I was contacted by Arief Zufar Hilmi, who told me he was working on reviving KotaGames under the name KotaGames Reborn. He wanted to collaborate, making me one of the game providers for the portal, with the added benefit that I could host any game I wanted on his server. At first, I was skeptical — mostly because I was paranoid about people stealing my source code (don’t ask why, I wasn’t even sure myself, haha). But eventually, I agreed, and integrated the game so that KotaGames users could log in with just one click.
{/* */}
He was also looking for more games to add, and suggested I download from the same Russian forum where I had found the Perang Titan clone. It turned out there were many other types of games there, not just Perang Titan. I helped translate several of them. Thanks to the skills I had gained from developing Sword Fight 2, I was even tasked with creating Monster Fight Rebirth from scratch — although I only got about 40% of the way through.
{/* */}
Due to time constraints and life changes, Sword Fight 2 never progressed beyond beta, and Monster Fight Rebirth was never finished. Both projects were abandoned in 2018 when I left for boarding school. From 2018 to 2021, I had no access to a computer except during semester breaks — and even then, I didn’t always spend my vacation continuing the projects. Sometimes, a break is just a break.
If I remember correctly, around 2020 or 2021, the decision was made to discontinue KotaGames Reborn. There were too many complaints — users wanted the nostalgic games from the original KotaGames, not new ones. The project also wasn’t profitable enough to justify the time spent maintaining it.
By this point, KotaGames Reborn was still buzzing with players, even though it had been left without an active admin or any new features. Sword Fight 2 — the old version of what I would later develop into Titan Saga — was still active on KotaGames Reborn in its untouched form.
Why I decided to build Titan Saga as a fully separate project, and how it all unfolded, is a story for Part 2.