3 South African games you can help develop

This is going to sound rather touchy feely but I don’t even care. Being away from home for 5 weeks has a strange way of making you extremely patriotic. Which is what has happened to me since staying in Ukraine. I feel the need to constantly speak up about how awesome my home country is. I have to stop myself from pointing out how much better it is in South Africa. We really do have it good! To cope with some of the home sickness I’ve been feeling I’ve started paying more attention to the South African game development scene. Consider if my little taste of home if you will. And I’ve found 3 South African games you can help develop. I also happen to think they’re all rather impressive.

First up, a firm favourite JENGO

I’ve spoken about JENGO previously and even done a play through of the game’s demo following a visit to their exhibition at Gamescom 2017. Here’s that video:

Well the crew at Robot Wizard have now upped the ante for 2018 and introduced a FIG funding programme which will allow you to contribute to the game, get something back and ultimately assist the team with paying voice talent, musicians, artists, programmers and all the folks behind the scenes who go into making a game a reality. They need 400 backstage backers to make this a reality. I’m backer number 69 (no jokes) and think you need to add your name to the list. This game got such a great response from the international community and I really want to see it finished, polished and ready to be used as an example of what SA game developers can do. If you want to support it then click here to find out more about the FIG campaign.

Spoke about this on 5fm but it deserves another mention, Beautiful Desolation

So, this game has technically already raised their funding goals on Kickstarter but I still think you need to drop some cash on it. For starters, the man responsible for composing music for DOOM, the Wolfenstein games and even last year’s Prey reboot has even signed on to work on the game. Developed by The Brotherhood in Cape Town, this game looks all sorts of amazing. It is set in a post apocalyptic Africa and showcases our continent and country in a way most games miss, in my opinion. The trailer gives me goosebumps every time:

Like I mentioned, the kickstarter campaign met all its goals but you’re still able to contribute via PayPal and I think you should. Click here to add some money to the dev budget. I love how “unique tribal punk” gets thrown around a lot to describe atheistic. I really cannot wait to get my hands on this game.

Unearthed

My player 2 dabbles in game development from time to time. While he doesn’t have a current project underway nor is he actively in the dev scene, he is still extremely passionate about game development. I’ve watched a stack of documentaries and picked his brain regularly to gain more insight in to what goes in to developing a game. Here’s what I know: First person shooters are hard to make. Which is why I Unearthed is my third SA game on a list of ones I think you need to help develop. I came across this one by accident and was only made aware that an SA dev company called Mad Matter Creative was behind it after reading the game’s website. It seems this is a solo project by someone called Ragel Alheit and when you look at the trailer you can’t help but be impressed:

There’s a first person shooter element while also being a multiplayer open world. The time and effort to make something like this is, in my limited understanding, a pretty big ask of any dev team, never mind one individual. I like the look of it and I like that it is local. So I think we all need to help this one become a reality, you can click here and add your email addie to the notification list. The Indiegogo campaign for this game launches in a few days.