Dream71 to develop video game for East Timor children

Local software giant Dream71 Bangladesh is set to develop two educational videogames for East Timor, a Southeast Asian nation situated in the Pacific, a development that can be viewed as yet another feather in the cap to the country's budding ICT sector.

Dream71 won an international tender under the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) based on the company's experience in this line of work.

The company had to fend off competition from 39 firms from Bangladesh, India, Australia, Brazil, Vietnam and the Philippines

"We won the bid in the face of serious competition," said Rashad Kabir, managing director of Dream71, while declining to disclose the project's total value.

Dream71 became the first local firm to produce educational platforms in Bangladesh back in 2016.

The company had developed science-based video games for sixth- to eighth-grade students with the help from the education ministry and access to information programme (a2i), another UNDP concern.

If the government provides the scope for local software companies like Dream71 to secure more international tenders, then they would surely bring glory for the country, said Kabir, also a director of the Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services (BASIS).

Dream71 has signed the agreement with the UNDP last Friday and can now begin developing the two games, which will be on environmental awareness and financial education platforms for students from grade five through to seven.

The project is set to be complete within the next four months, after which the local software company will maintain the quality of the computer game through bug patches for the following four months, he said.

Students will have the choice to play in either English, Portuguese or Tetun, a local language of East Timor, and each game will have a total runtime of about two hours.

"The UNDP office in East Timor will help us with the language issues," Kabir said.

The games' development will be carried out virtually due to the social distancing guidelines in place aimed at curbing the spread of coronavirus within the country.

Dream71 started as a video game developer but has now grown into a full-fledged software company with clients from 14 countries, including Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands and the UAE.

The firm is specifically proficient in producing human resource and tax management applications.

Recently, Dream71 expanded their network to Africa by striking an agreement with Melt Group, a company that specialises in recruitment, selection, workforce management, staffing and professional training, for various ventures in the continent.

Dream71 is also currently in the process of securing a huge work order from Afghanistan, Kabir added.