Squeezing into the Industry: How a Couple African Kids Made a Video Game

[Music] hello hello everyone welcome to the little little dab of spice of African spice here to this whole conference it's only available here so a good job when coming yeah we hello I'm Ben as you mentioned I do game design and marketing at gamma Corp a South African base independent game studio which I could find it was a very lovely and handsome man over here hi I'm sugar I'm the business and technical side of me I'm a cop some say they wanted more swag but fateful we reached our debut game semblance in July 2018 sugar and I founded the studio Straight Outta University with no real-world work experience in games or otherwise it's a puzzle platformer where the world is made of play-doh as you can see and when we're feeling bold which is often we

call it the first true platformer because you can move the platforms that's it we have very long linguistic spiel joke lots of journalists have heard it I'm not going to enact that on you so there's tall kind of centers around the idea of breaking in to indie games in 2019 we started making semblance it was I guess our goal to break in right at the beginning we had assumptions and internalized ideas about what it was like to make games and this was drawn mainly from public perception and culture surrounding independent games those assumptions were often wrong and following them blindly would have left us in a very bad place and probably wouldn't be able to do this talk right now so we wanted to give this talk sharing our journey into indie games from South Africa and how we made decisions to be able to make more than one game pretty much and hopefully this tour can be used by a first-time creators to get insight into what it's like to try break into indie

games in 2019 and also help fellow African creators trying to do the same so he has some of the assumptions we had when we started making same plans we were going to build this huge fan base we were gonna get great preview coverage get selected for wards and exhibitions get a publisher get big youtubers playing our game and just sit back and then our amazing work be found and on release amazing reviews tons of money and recoup in the first month or week let's look at how we did we had copious and high-quality preview coverage from media outlets during development including all these ones and various others the game was selected for one to do dozen exhibitions all over the world during development including places like South by Southwest the maze and PAX East we won some awards the excellence in game design awarded but summits and were

nominated for various others over the years also when we accepted Awards people stared at sugars biceps he's wearing long sleeves today thank you for your sacrifice we also signed with a lovely publisher Good Shepherd entertainment they helped us go from this tiny mini booth at PAX East 2017 on the left to this giant branded semblance booth with branded stress balls and beanbags at PAX East 2018 generally they just helped the quality production go up a lot and then our game got feature one tender twice and upon launch we became the first African developed IP to ever release some tender platform so that was cool when we shipped this is a livestream of our tweet deck during the launch hours there was a lot of a lot of activity and reviews.reviews got pretty we're pretty good we're currently ranked as the 68th best PC game of 2018 a Metacritic and I've no idea other work that's up but a 30-second most shared switch game of 2018 we had a million social media impressions during our launch month we all new and trending in steam at about 14 million impressions up

until now on our steam page unlike a few hundred thousand visits we had no Nintendo launch feature though and games as a service really sucks we announced four weeks before we were going to launch this is when we're launching and a week before this game no man's sky was like yo we're coming back and the law the the big update that changed that games Agassiz wants the same day as same time as us and also something like small indie games you probably haven't heard of fort neither and GTA 5 online they updated again as well that was pre mono and now the sales it runs having like flashbacks indie games are dead so PC a few thousand users on Steam after all that on switch it's better not a whole lot better a multiple better and we did not get rich we have not yet recurved it's very sad

but and in case you're not familiar with published models no recoup means no semblance sales money has come to us yet we don't see similar to dead though it's less than a year since the game has been released we have a couple tens of thousand wishlist on Steam Store and we work with our publisher to look at other deals and avenues for the game to recoup in the future that I mean obviously again didn't sell like how we still alive how's it possible and we're still here working on projects and like similar could have been a game that could have been better in a swathe of ways you can look back at any game you launched in like could've been better this way it was so bare if we did this all the sort of things right it's like hard to retrospect can you do that but what you can definitely do is try and leverage your development time in perhaps lateral ways to ensure you can continue making games which is what we want to talk about today and we say lateral because these goals and decisions might not necessarily help your debut game perform better sometimes

you might even conflict with that but it might enable you to make another game and sometimes those lateral goals will help you with your current game I always like to say quite cynically the best creative integrity is being able to make another game for more experienced folks some of this process will be old hat but for debut creators like us we have to learn a lot of it and actively decide to pursue it so we think it's crucial for particularly new creators looking to make their first commercial indie game to understand some of this stuff and really I can mention earlier we came across this because the writing's on the wall it's hard to avoid all this news and so Media stuff about games great ones not always selling well and we also saw from researching and talk to people that debut games newcomer debut games rarely do well and my newcomer we mean here people have no real-world experience a work experience debut gains by people from other industries who come into games perform better but if you look at games that have come out and done well

from debut it's like one a year maybe two a year you're down wells in 2015 events here in 2016 torrential island frog detective game in 2018 and Saudi Valley which kind of destroys this whole metaphor but yeah but it is very rare that debut games do well it's just how it is and so what we want to kind of do is look at the lateral pillars of breaking in and these are what they are because we ready to succeed prepared to fail you'll redefine your metrics of success after have a long term vision has to be visible be reputable you have to learn and apply it rapidly and you have to carve a contextual path and now sugar we'll take you through the timeline of semblance development and how we implemented those lateral Palace yeah so like Ben said we had a few lateral pillars that we used through our development to kind of guide the way we were making decisions and how we were

gonna break in to the industry something has really started in 2015 and it started as a university project that quickly turned into a commercial entity and company and at the time the game looked like this the the date in the ROM and the gift is wrong but the game looked like this at the time and when we were presenting the game at university one of my external examiner's after the the presentation turns to us and says hey the game looks kind of interesting why don't you guys make it into commercial project and at that time that external examiner was a no action or a dog developer a judgment of who worked on some of the titles like The Last of Us so we thought it was a pretty good sign to just go ahead and keep on this thing as a real thing you know as it was always our dreams to be indie developers as well so we put the project on ice took it out of the university and it's kind of finished doing University

through 25th 2015 and even as early as then we knew one of the first things we needed to do was to learn about the industry learn about how to make commercial games we read everything we could find on Kama Sutra what she youtube videos from GDC and try to apply those learnings as quickly as possible and later through the development we also wanted to be we got access into sharing communities like the indie megabeth mailing list and part of the indie games residency program stew gun and so learning was always a very important part of our journey come in 2016 and now we got to be finished University and we're ready to jump into the project really hit it hit the road running but we were trying to build a game form a team with no dollar no cash money and the way it kind of looks from our perspective in South Africa so we can't even look at things like

Kickstarter we can't run a Kickstarter because you have to have a bank account that's not from South Africa so that's off the table the government not quite sure what video games are at the moment at that time though you know they know it makes a lot of money but yes whatever in fact you to submit your game for ratings but South Africa you have to turn it in by VHS because it's it's it's under it's under movies so it's a bit the tricky situation there and local investors into the game space a few and far between so that that was always a tricky thing and because of no money had to fund the team and you know as kids growing up we couldn't really they were in mismatch of commitment levels within the team and that caused a game to not really develop that much haphazardly throughout 2016 but we kept going for it and in mid of 2016 we found the

deformation mechanic and this was kind of what was making the game interested because up until and then it was about a character changing shape and size and so we continued developing the art style got a bit better but the funding situation was still keeping us back so towards the end of 2016 we decided hey let's scrounge up a few pennies from under the couch and fund an artist to help us create the visual style of the game that it is sort of today and the idea was so that we could use that a little bit of money and then pitch it to a publisher and all our problems would be solved but at that time centered all the publishers we could get a hold of everyone was like yeah the mechanic is cool but it's just not there yet in fact one of the publishers even came back to us and said this looks like part of a student project that's ironic because we had just paid an artist to work on the game but we kept working on it made a

little plan and we found one of those rare local investors to give us a bit of money to make this game and at the time was still small dreams to just release or a niche but we kept working on it with a bit more money and got an artist on board full-time and so like with these lateral pillars as well we try to use them in a way to inform production and design decisions as well like semblance that are forming terrain mechanic is very deep there's like a lot you can do with it but we decided to like rather than make like you know a five-year project the very in vogue with indie games we decided to cut a lot of features like this beautiful jiggly pink platform I miss it so much like and a lot of games do this right but we were very aggressive about the scope like cutting features and ideas and really making it as as small as we possibly could and this helped also with funding because you know too inexperienced kids

from Africa it seems like a Nigerian hack email being like please give us this money like it's ridiculous but like with the cost of living in South Africa being way cheaper than other parts of the world and us having a very small scope game was way easier for a publisher or investor to be like okay this is like you know the risk reward is quite good here and then we spent a lot of time making sure the game just like stood out really well and this was active in terms of the long term vision what we literally looked through steam and all these places and like what colors aren't people using there's a lot of Brown was a lowbrow trouble against do you like the brown yeah so we were like let's do pink and purple oh yeah sounds banila but it was a real decision we made and helps it stand out and then like sugar said like finding that interesting mechanic of the deforming terrain here's another one and then in 2017 there's two parts of 2017 the first is when we still self-publishing at this point our goal was to go everywhere and gain international exposure

we paid ourselves an exposure it's true and this pillar in this part was be visible and be reputable in terms of the African perspective the market is quite big like people in Africa spend money on video games but the amount that goes to local creators is like so small so it's very hard to survive selling directly to the African market at the moment so as a result you have to solve for the West which means you have to travel to find that market you have to make sure to meet journalists and publishers and funders and platform holders and other developers in the West because very few of them have representatives on like the continent it's almost a billion people but they're like you know that's not fun and it's not easy to travel because of visas how long it takes money travel is far and eats into development time and for us we still made that decision to be seen and to be known doing talks like right now being at events being on Twitter just taking up a little bit of mindshare so that people know about us submitting to like exhibitions and

awards all the time we actively try to make people know about us and a lot of this was you know gaining a reputation and prestige so that we could point to stuff in future to prove you weren't just too inexperienced African kids out of university you should give money to which we still are but instead we can now say we're also award-winning game developers of the top 100 Metacritic video game and those things might not necessarily have made the game sell better but they helped us in future with the reputation and so as part of this thanks to Train Jan's scholarship we went to our first GDC in 2017 which is where we pitched Nintendo in the corner of a park with the Sun app I'd use my body to shield it I don't think you can even see the video he was black yeah that's fine and then right after winter pax MIT Xbox and this was really the first time we had ever really been able to meet platform holders because there was no other way to meet them and at PAX East we met Prescott cover and made a bunch of publishers as well and what this really

comes down to in terms of like being visible and reputable is shooting your shots you just gotta take the opportunities and make things happen like when you're traveling from cybergun and it takes 24 hours on a plane to get to San Francisco or Los Angeles so you're not just gonna just sit back and hope for the best you're gonna let go out and get it and this is really to provide I think by the skiff this is me at e3 2018 an official and an official devolver digital marketing material about to almost-kiss nodular ii one of the important people at devolver digital and we were in the middle of a meeting pitching assemblance and it was like okay what's happening but i really like this is what you have to do like if it's really hard to get press at at events right because you're just some like no-name approached shouldn't have just left this loop but i have nothing else to show you on the slide i'm sorry like if you're going to you can't book press and events because no one's ever heard of you so you see that like blaring yellow like marker on their

badge saying press you just walk up to them and try get them to come play your game and you send those emails that might never get responses you just walk up to people and what we did as well as just submit to everything we could find like every Google Form we could find we submitted I have some beautiful rejection letters I just saw them all there's like dozens of them it's it's lovely and then stuff like the first true platformer as well as like so ridiculous but no one's ever gonna forget the time someone told them they were making the first true platformer and it was quite intense we did 25 cities and five continents in 18 months and at one point we did four continents in four weeks like this is really the scale of how aggressively we chase this idea and you know stuff that speak up spoken about before like sharing developments on Twitter and for us this is actually bad reaching developers and press and platforms not even necessary players because you could talk to them and be like oh yeah I saw this game on Twitter this is like a really ugly gift for the game they've got an interesting mechanic and I got a few hundred retweets and it's also just like interacting people with a personal level on Twitter I had

this like really ridiculous semi viral tweets about me looking in pain looking in some one player game and I booked we booked the press of this tweets like some from GamesRadar quote Whedon I was like always wondered if game developers did this and then he ended up covering the game at PAX East there at launch he wrote this really long thing or because I tweeted this random thing and interacted with him and part two is the publisher which is shooters so at this point in the production we knew that we had something special on our hands and we continued to keep traveling but now this time we were trying to actively get up get a publisher on board we traveled to place the games call me three went back to student and all this time while we were making this game because we were half running out of money half trying to get a publisher the game was ready to ship like every six months we were always demo ready that's why we could submit to many festivals and exhibitions

and that is how we ended up with a game starting to look like this it's a lot prettier and some of those publishers that said no to us in the beginning were like he will sell games looking good so we we started we started actively looking and discussing with several publishers about what it would mean for them to jump on board and for us this was important because it was one of our pillars we wanted to have the publisher so we were ready to succeed but we as we knew the writing on the wall we were also preparing in the unfortunate event reality that we may fail and that was the way we went about doing that was we got ourselves a publisher and because we had the publisher and the visibility we were not a put we could talk to the government in South Africa and help us get a grant and that was going to help us tide us through if

anything happened and then we went as far as even just saying that we were going to pay ourselves a lot lower so that just in case things don't go well we were in a position where we could still be working on things for going forward and this was just one of the ways that we were making sure we were thinking about development that we were going to be able to keep going another thing was to make sure that we carved ourselves a contextual path in this indie game market and you get a lot of knowledge from GDC and all these places but we felt that a lot of that knowledge is from a Western perspective so we wanted to take it and turn and make it a way we looked at it from South Africa one of the biggest things that you might hear is that all Greiner shows going to things like praxis may not be the greatest thing to do but for us even with it being a large much bigger investment we felt that was important

because that gave us that access to people that we would have never been able to and I think things like that is what happens when you become more visible and you go out there and that even helped for people to know more about South Africa and we were able to hold something like Africa Games week last year and then keep bringing more people to know about the ecosystem in South Africa so that we're also building the local industry that will in turn help us going forward and 2018 launch year we're excited we've got the publisher and things are going well and we launched we were getting ready to launch semblance but we're still always dealing with uniquely South African issues I know for you you know we launched on Nintendo switch and for going through consoles you need to go through certification and circuit certification will take a long time sometime but you also need to submit the game as early as possible and I know we

were kind of leaving it to the last minute but the day I was meant to be up loading the game to Nintendo Power disappears and then this is something that's like common it's even happening right now it's called load shedding where you they turn off the power for a select number of hours until you know you get power again so I had to explain top of she's like yeah I can't really do anything this is no power so those are kind of those issues a week we kind of deal with but we eventually got it on Nintendo and got it certified and so one of the big things also is while we were making the game we wanted to have a different way of thinking about success so we we didn't want it to be purely about sales and whether you made money at first we redefined those metrics of success by can we make a name for ourselves before our debut title can we make sure that we're not just trying to make one game we're trying to make lots

of games and that's what made some of the decisions like the most important things was to ship a game so that we could get to the next one and that's kind of how we were able to say that semblance was a successful launch for us and that's how we thought that it was going to be going forward and one of the next pillars is having a long term vision and we felt that we're not just building one game we want to build the next game and the next game and the next game so everything was about a long-term vision and how he looked about making decisions today we're going to be in turn to help us tomorrow and those were things like making sure that the game was well received and so that when we went back to publishers for a second time with a new game we could always point back to being like hey we managed to ship again and so that was what kept us going with a long term vision and even now that's how we keep

thinking about making games and how we can keep making the next game yeah so as we come to hello and as a result yeah I think as a result of this in spite of those sales we have broken now and prime to break out and what we mean by that is you know we've made a game we finished people can tell we doing that and we've set ourselves up for success in future and that's in result of similar it's not making any profit yet right so while our and perhaps many other first-time creators similar assumptions might have been met with the launch of semblance our investment in this lateral process and goals has enabled us to continue making games and Rowin cydia and just like details like that mean sugars still being fully employed since July 2:18 with like a bunch of money to use for prototypes and contractors we're pitching a new project here at GDC and it's been easier to get meetings and

we're also looking at other funding avenues and like I said we're primed for the future we're more informed more connected and more reputable as well and some of this is so the GDC talk this process is still ongoing though so ask us in six months if it all worked and so just to summarize those those processes is you know be ready to succeed but also prepared to fail in case sadly it might happen redefine your matrix of success than necessary just think it's always about like sales have that long-term vision best creative integrity is being able to make another game be visible be reputable so that you can have something to point to in people know a view for the future learn a lot and make decisions so you can apply that learning quickly you can't apply things you learned on the first game if your first game takes five to ten years so and also just carve that contextual path and part of that is just remembering all advice is bad including including this and the

reason it's bad is because it's not it's not contextual it doesn't apply to your context right and because of that you need to go out and get as much advice as possible so that you can decide which advice is good you can fail with it experiment and see what really works for you and so thank you for listening to us so we're like 5 minutes for questions are you fine with questions yeah ok cool does anyone have any questions I think there's a mic somewhere oh thank god it's always awkward when you're like this I know any questions and you wait like 2 minutes and then no one else is in it so I'm curious from when you guys decided to move into a commercial build how much longer it took than what you initially estimated and then how much of that was just inherent to the development process that you hadn't learned about and how much of it was things you wish you could have done differently you did it again well I think in fact when we started the

project we were like yeah we're gonna just do it was always gonna be our starter project like oh we'll do six to eight months you know gonna get it on a niche and then we'll get to the real game so when we started we had a bit up ups and downs and so some of it was based on things like we just didn't know about making video games like things take extra long but another thing that made it longer was because we were doing things like trying to get a publisher going to events sometimes like didn't want to be working on the game for like two weeks and so like development wasn't as straight cut as possible we still think the game was built technically in eighteen months but even though the lifespan was three years because three years would barely any work on them I don't know if that answers the question hi could you meet guys maybe pay me like a quick picture of what the game development scene is like in South Africa because it's like I have no idea it's super curious to me I

think the total number of workers is like around 700 at the moment so it's like a very small scene but we've had some like very big successes the most American game ever made broforce is from South Africa also a penis sports game which is nominated for a narrative award for the Sierra Taj if general jostling I didn't make the rules stuff like viscera cleanup detail which is the game about like cleaning up after like sci-fi massacres there like so we have a bunch of like successful games for like a very tiny community right and we had you might never Mays balloon which is as big independent Games Festival in Berlin and flossed like five six years we've had a Janice Berg version which has helped us connect to the international community quite a lot so it's quite small but like for the impact it has it's like quite cool yeah I can send you blogs and articles is a lot ok so one thing you

guys mentioned is that when you first launched you were kind of going up against a lot of Triple A games a lot of daily big games so I guess my question is what can we do as consumers to kind of support indie developers like you guys more there's lots of things but yeah yeah I don't know it's hard I mean like you kind of sold the matrix we had like you know we had a million social media impressions at launch like we had a lot of metrics which on paper showed that the game could sell and would sell right so I don't know as a consumer rights I don't know stop playing fortnight's right you and all the streamers and it's just like they only play for tonight so yeah I don't know it's just the whole ecosystem it's like systemic I think I wish I wish I knew so I could tell you to do it and force you and follow up every six months to make sure you're doing yeah sorry Thanks

great work up question how much money has been spent up to this point in fact is there a crazier on the game yeah just just it's been a few years now sigh is there I think we might be in the NDA without publishing exact amount you know it's like a few hundred thousand but it's really hard to tell as well because of the way it was developed like sugar said like it's 18 months is the real realistic full time development and that happened over like three years it's also like real amount like if we paid ourselves fully how much would've costs yeah it's really hard yeah like the first year we were both living with our parents there was no cost then technically but it was like time that you spend so you were to calculate that yeah it's definitely yeah hundreds yeah cool no more questions cool all right thanks for coming

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