Ilocos Norte students turn ‘Bangsak’ into battle royale video game

Before graduating from college, four students from the Mariano Marcos State University (MMSU) reinvented a traditional Filipino street game as a multiplayer battle royale video game. MMSU College of Computing and Information Sciences students Clinton Wayne Visaya, Jansen Espiritu Baloaloa, Gabriel Jerickson Galapin, and Michael Ryann Luen Velasco — collectively known as Mangken Studios — presented their game, BangSak: Water Rising, at the Level Up 2.0: Esports GameDev Challenge during the 2026 ALT+TAB Festival, held on June 20 and 21. Representing the Ilocos Region, the winning entry from Region I was among the featured titles at the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) Pavilion, where visitors experienced locally developed independent video games. From the streets to the screen Bangsak, which the game took inspiration from, is a traditional Filipino hide-and-seek street game. The name comes from the sound of a gun (bang) and pretending to stab (saksak). In this variation of hide-and-seek, the seeker must also shout “bang” and the name of the hider to capture them, while the hider must say “sak” to save the lives of captured players. While BangSak: Water Rising follows the general rules of the street game, there is an added twist to make the game more interesting: they turned the game into a battle royale. A battle royale pertains to a competition with multiple combatants, and victory is typically decided when there is only one person or team standing. In video games, to force players to engage with each other, the “safe zone” on the map continuously shrinks. In BangSak: Water Rising, the game developers shrank the map by adding rising floods because, according to game designer and developer Clinton Visaya, flooding was the most prominent disaster during the game’s development. “Main inspiration namin ang flood-control projects. ‘Yung game map, may mga sira-sirang tubo at umuulan, so unti-unti siyang bumabaha at ‘yung drainage pipes ay hindi gumagana,” Visaya said. (The flood-control projects were our main inspiration. The game map has broken pipes, and it’s raining, so it slowly floods because the drainage pipes don’t work.) Several politicians and officials from the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) are under investigation for alleged anomalous and substandard flood-control projects, which led to nationwide protests to call for accountability from the government. Meanwhile, the game’s pixel art is inspired by the cities of Batac and Laoag, the capital of Ilocos Norte. “Sa pag-create ko ng characters, nag-base ako sa typical na uso rito sa Ilocos. At since malapit lang naman ‘yung Batac sa amin dito, tinitingnan ko ‘yung mga outfit ng mga tao kung ano ang swak sa character,” lead artist Gabriel Jerickson Galapin said. (In the creation of the characters, I based it on what is trending here in Ilocos. And because we are close to Batac, I looked at the people’s outfits and looked at whether they fit the character.) “Sa pag-design ko ng environment ng game, ‘yung mga buildings and mga trees ay nag-base lang din sa Laoag. Bumisita ako doon sa mga certain places at tiningnan ‘yung colors at structures ng buildings,” he added. (In the design of the game environment, the buildings and the trees were based on Laoag. I visited certain places and looked at the colors and the structures of the buildings.) First and last competition win The team shared that this was not their first competition. Their previous game development challenge landed them in fourth place, which the team said lowered their morale. “Napakasakit po sa amin na tanggapin noon na hindi kami nanalo,” Visaya said. (It was very painful for us to accept that we didn’t win.) However, this only motivated them to continue improving until, finally, in their last year in college, they became a finalist. “Sobrang ecstatic and surreal kasi hindi namin naakala na ‘yung simpleng game namin is ma-award ng ganoong prestige,” Visaya added. (It felt so ecstatic and surreal for us because we didn’t think that our simple game would be given that kind of prestige.) Meanwhile, Eloihim Baculpo, MMSU instructor and the BangSak game development team’s mentor, said it was a proud moment for him to see his students break their “fourth-place curse.” “Every time they have a competition, they always choose me to guide them. When they won, it was a really proud moment and emotional moment for me, because these fresh graduates deserved to win on their very last competition,” Baculpo said. Keeping tradition alive According to Jansen Baloaloa, the game’s lead developer, the team chose Bangsak not only for its simple mechanics, but also because they had fond memories of playing the street game as children. “It has a practical aspect, as well as an emotional aspect, during the development of the game,” Baloaloa said. The team also credited their vision to recreate Bangsak to remind the youth of traditional Filipino street games. “Ang end-goal namin ay to spread awareness sa mga cultural games ng mga Pilipino,” Visaya said. (Our end-goal is to spread awareness of Filipino cultural games.) “It also serves as our hope for it to act as a preservation of our traditional games. We hope that children will play these games again even in the future because there’s still a trace of it in the games in a digital format,” Baloaloa said. Furthermore, the team hoped that their award-winning game would show that the Philippines has its own creative video game developers. “We have creative Pinoys and creative games,” Visaya said. BangSak: Water Rising, which is still in development, is planned to be released on Steam, a digital distribution platform for PC games. – Rappler.com Jose Emmanuel Thayer is a fourth-year BA Communication student at the University of the Philippines Baguio and an alumnus of the Aries Rufo Journalism Fellowship of Rappler for 2025.