The daily struggles of being a South African Indie Game Developer

What an interesting week and a half it's been! As you probably know by now, we are from South Africa, and we are part time game developers. Being in a country like South Africa, especially not in the main areas/cities, makes it a pretty challenging thing.

Jayson sits in a small town called Loxton. You know Courage the Cowardly Dog? Courage lives in the middle of nowhere (they even have a newspaper called Nowhere News). Now, Loxton is also in the middle of nowhere. There are about 5 streets in the town, and the local grocery store is so old fashioned that you give them a list of what you want at the counter, and they go fetch it for you! The one really huge obstacle he faces is our lifeline - the internet. Loxton does not have ADSL yet. Haha, I say "yet" as if it's actually going to happen sometime, but who knows... He makes use of extremely expensive 3G internet (expensive as in so little data for so much money!), as well as ADSL shared wirelessly from the neighbouring big town, Beaufort-West, which also has its fair share of problems...

I myself have also been hit with internet woes. In South Africa we have one big tele-communications company Telkom. They have the monopoly because the government has a big stake in it, so why wouldn't they prevent others from joining in the fun! Neotel was supposed to be the competition, but that just didn't happen in a way that made any impact worth mentioning. Anyway, ever since Saturday my internet has been extremely poor or non-existent as well.

And last, but definitely not least, we have Eskom. Another government owned entity. They are supposed to supply us with that one thing that indie developers need even more than internet - electricity. Countrywide demand quickly outgrew supply, and there wasn't anything in place to take that into account. We still have pretty much the same capacity as 20 years ago, but with a few million more power-hungry souls. The result? We have load shedding on an almost daily basis. It's two hours at a time, so not a total train smash - the problem, though, is Telkom is more often than not affected by load shedding as well, meaning even more internet woes.

BUT, we have a passion for what we do, and these minor hurdles are not going to stop us from making cool games!

Remember in one of my earlier posts I talked how you would sort a poker hand? Well, I've been working a small little poker game on the side, and it's actually close to being finished. It's not going to be a full poker game that includes making bets and folding and stuff like that. I have dubbed it Pass-Along-Poker :) The idea is simple - you can have up to 5 players playing against each other on one device (phone or tablet). And you basically just draw poker hands, discard the cards you don't want, and then show off at the end to see who wins. Whoever wins the round scores a point, and whoever loses the round loses a point. This can be played as a interesting drinking game perhaps, or just a way to kill some time when the load shedding hits.

The core game play functionality is in, and I'm now busy making it a bit more pleasing on the eye (attempting rather). Here's the main screen for the game:

That took me about 5 hours to design. Something that would have taken a real designer 20 minutes perhaps?

Anyway, hopefully my internet improves, I'd rather have NO internet, than slow internet.