It was initially rather surprising when Moon Studios, well known for developing the beloved Metroidvania games Ori and the Blind Forest and its sequel, announced that its next game isn't a Metroidvania at all. No Rest for the Wicked is an action-RPG not unlike Diablo, but the devs have reassured that it's "much more Metroidvania" than most games in the genre.
Studio Bolland and the highs and lows of entering the South African game dev scene
06.03.2024 - 10:25 / gamesindustry.biz
You can read all our South Africa Games Week articles on this page.
So far during this South Africa Games Week special, we've highlighted some established studios – Nyamakop, 24 Bit Games, as well as Sea Monster Entertainment and Free Lives to be published later this week – and a more recent studio founded by South African industry veterans (Six Peaks Games).
Studio Bolland on the other hand, represents the new wave. The animation studio, founded in 2014 in Cape Town and currently employing ten people, made its first foray into game development in 2023 and hasn't shipped a commercial game yet.
"The advice that we got from many, many people was: don't start by making a big game, try to make a lot of small prototypes first, and then hopefully something will come out of those prototypes," explains managing director Richard Bolland, also an animator and game designer. "So that's what we did. We made 12 prototypes in 12 months and that's where we are today."
Bolland started making games as a hobbyist at 16 and wanted to make a career out of it but at the time, in 2005, there weren't any game development courses for him to pursue after high school, so he went into animation instead. Fast forward to 2020, lockdown happened, and "everyone kind of reassessed their life," he says.
"I realised that I wanted to go back to where it all started: making games. I spent two years just skirting around the periphery of this African games scene and then decided to jump in off [this] research, and speaking to a lot of people.
"The first step was for us to hire a game developer because the last time I coded was ActionScript 2.0 back in 2005, and it was too much of a learning curve for me to learn C# or something, so I decided it'd be better to hire [Ashveer Jugdav]. And that's basically how we got into making games from scratch."
Studio Bolland's experience provides interesting insight into the first steps of a studio. Each prototype they developed was released on itch.io so the team could get feedback, analyse the metrics, and decide on next steps. All the prototypes were made so they could be played in a browser so they would be easily accessible to players, and most of them got "a couple hundred views and maybe 100+ plays," Bolland says. The team also started entering game jams, most notably one for idle games which led to some hard learned lessons.
"We didn't really know what an idle game was. Some of us had heard about it, but we definitely hadn't made an idle game before. We just decided to do it without much expectation, and when we uploaded [Idle Sands], we were shocked to see that we had, instead of hundreds of players, now thousands of players playing this game.
"We thought to ourselves: this is the game we've been
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