{"id":659,"date":"2013-05-03T09:00:25","date_gmt":"2013-05-03T09:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.qcfdesign.com\/?p=659"},"modified":"2013-05-03T09:00:25","modified_gmt":"2013-05-03T09:00:25","slug":"free-lives-and-game-dev-in-south-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.qcfdesign.com\/?p=659","title":{"rendered":"Free Lives and Game Dev in South Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"2013-05-01freelivesImage\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When parts of QCF Design went to good ol\u2019 San Fran for this year\u2019s GDC, I opted to stay on my home continent due to a combination of local life admin and an extreme hatred of sleeping in airport lounges between flights.<\/p>\n

I spent a lot of that time working in the office of another South African game dev studio known as Free Lives<\/a>, the chaps responsible for the ever-excellent BROFORCE<\/a>. They\u2019re a great crew and I really like what they\u2019re doing for South Africa\u2019s presence in game development (Evan Greenwood \u2013 God King And Ex Chief Beard Cultivator of Free Lives \u2013 just recently presented a talk at A MAZE<\/a> in Germany). But although this blog post was originally going to be about them<\/i>, I realised after a draft or two that my time spent with these guys has inspired me to talk about the broader dev scene in our country and what I consider to be our primary challenges as a group of developers trying to build momentum in Africa.<\/p>\n

In a nutshell, precious few game devs in South Africa have any idea what the rest are doing or how they\u2019re doing it. It\u2019s all delightfully (distressingly?) ad-hoc, and hopping between offices is an interesting and educational experience because everybody is trying something different according to their own mixture of global industry knowledge, local industry knowledge and gut feelings. QCF Design, despite the success it has enjoyed so far, is still struggling to figure out a lot of stuff. So is Free Lives. And the same goes for everyone else who tries to start a company here.<\/p>\n

It makes for some rather weird game studio structures \u2013 at QCF, our freelancers and correspondents heavily outnumber the humble \u201cin-office\u201d crew of three programmers (all other talent being distributed across some rather radical geographic extremes). This means that the heart<\/i> of our studio is surprisingly detached from the majority<\/i> of our studio, which causes all of the communication and workflow hassles one would expect. Free Lives expanded from a lone developer to a crew of six (plus freelancers) in the space of a year, all working in half an office room (shared, interestingly enough, with former employer and fellow game studio Tasty Poison<\/a>).<\/p>\n

South Africa still has a little trouble supporting and legitimising its own game developers. The industry is small, poorly-recognised and rather heavily misunderstood by anyone in our country with the actual means and capital to financially back a big studio (\u201cWut are gaemz?\u201d asks many a local venture capitalist). Practically everyone is indie \u2013 companies who try to build something bigger with the standard model of publisher support tend to struggle as much as any game developer would, with the added burden of working not only against the standard industry demands, but their own relative isolation.<\/p>\n

Stuff that seems to work just fine overseas often turns out to be a really, really poor bet locally. In South African game development, practically everyone is still a newcomer, practically everything is untested, and our own government still classifies games as films due to a rather bizarre set of technicalities put in motion by bureaucracy years ago (you don\u2019t want to know how much legal awkwardness this causes). We have to take these things into account when we make decisions about anything<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Want to be an engine coder? You\u2019ll probably need to adjust your attitude or go overseas. Want to work on the AAA MMO of your dreams? We don\u2019t have unlimited time, resources and support for something like that here. One needs to be prepared for workarounds, new ideas and plans of action that make sense uniquely for South African devs.<\/p>\n

But perhaps the most fixable (and therefore frustrating) problem of our relatively young industry remains that fractured nature amidst devs. Our recent formation of a legally-recognised game development body in South Africa is promising, but does little to help the surprisingly isolationist policies of many local studios \u2013 every month, we discover new game development groups that have been labouring for years without contacting local organisations. Of those, many will pop their heads in briefly only to return to relative solitude and obscurity. Developers often have no idea what\u2019s going on just half a country (or even half a city) away, and scores of South Africans still participate in global events with the belief that they\u2019re alone in their passion.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a puzzling culture \u2013 one that continues to bewilder us as formal South African game development gets bigger and bigger \u2013 and is most often summed up in the words of the isolated devs themselves when they unveil their grand plans:<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to show the world that South Africans can make games.\u201d<\/p>\n

The world kinda already knows that we can make games. Sure, people may not consciously realise that a product is South African, but we\u2019ve definitely taken to the stage. It doesn\u2019t actually matter if our audience pays much attention to our nationality, but it seems odd that local devs themselves have little to no understanding of this country\u2019s international impact, or its growing, formalised community<\/a>, even as they spend years toiling away on that One Great Project that will supposedly change the local scene forever!<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a funny country we live in. As successful as we\u2019re collectively being on a global front, there\u2019s surprisingly little internal communication among our professionals. I find myself wondering: is this a South African thing? Is it a developing industry thing? Or are we actually just getting our dose of a problem that has always affected everyone and will continue to do so until the end of time?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When parts of QCF Design went to good ol\u2019 San Fran for this year\u2019s GDC, I opted to stay on my home continent due to a combination of local life admin and an extreme hatred of sleeping in airport lounges between flights. I spent a lot of that time working in the office of another […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qcfdesign.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qcfdesign.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qcfdesign.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qcfdesign.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qcfdesign.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.qcfdesign.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qcfdesign.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qcfdesign.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qcfdesign.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}