SA indie studio Nyamakop accepted into global games accelerator Stugan

South African independent games studio Nyamakop has been selected as one of global games accelerator Stugan’s 2017 members.

The Kenyan-South African duo from Johannesburg, who have developed the game Semblance, made the announcement in a press release to Ventureburn today.

Nyamakop’s co-founders, Ben Myres and Cukia Kimini, will be part of 15 game developer teams from around the world (see the full list here) invited to attend the accelerator.

The teams will stay in the Swedish woods for two months in which time they will work on their dream independent video games, while they are housed and fed, with mentors visiting each week to give feedback on the games.

The project is a non-profit accelerator co-founded and sponsored by creators who have worked on games such Angry Birds, Candy Crush Saga and Minecraft.

‘We’re excited to learn, collaborate with accelerator’s mentors, other creators’

Previous attendees have included the likes of Tom Francis, creator of successful indie game Gunpoint.

Stugan is now in its third year. Developers of SA games Cadence and Kingdom in the Sky have featured in the two previous editions of the accelerator programme.

Myres and Kimini started Nyamakop in 2015, while they were doing their honours degree in game design at the University of the Witwatersrand.

“We presented our final year project game to the external examiner, Judd Simantov — an ex-Naughty Dog lead who worked on Uncharted and The Last of Us. Judd was impressed by our project – just a prototype then, and suggested we make it into a full game. This game was Semblance,” says Myres

He describes Semblance as a “playdough platformer with deformable terrain, set in a minimalist world”.

“It’s a game that asks, what if you could deform and reshape the world itself? Semblance takes the idea of a ‘platform’ in a platformer and turns it on its head. What if the platform was actually part of the gameplay, part of the way you solved problems?” says Myres

He says Semblance is a game that takes arguably one of the most saturated genres in games today, the platformer, and makes it feel fresh again.

“It encourages you to think laterally about problems you’ve solved with a simple jump dozens of times before,” he says.

Myres says they are excited to learn and collaborate with the accelerator’s mentors and other creators at Stugan 2017 to help them to finish the development of Semblance.