Kenya-Ghana collaboration seeks to revive game production

In an effort to revive Africa's dormant game production industry, two leading game producers from Kenya and Ghana have teamed up.

Wesley Kiriinya, Kenya's top video game producer, and Eyram Tawia of Ghana are collaborating to produce world-class games. Kiriinya, who is the technical director at Sinc-studios, produced Kenya's first video game, "Adventures of Nyangi." The game is based on African folklore, a feature he intends to present to the world stage.

"My video game concepts are based on African stories, myths and legends. I like my games to be entertaining, fun, challenging and educational. Currently I'm targeting the PC platform, but I plan to venture into the mobile devices platform," Kiriinya said.

Citing the scarcity of video games with themes based on African traditions, Kiriinya said the world needs to understand Africa beyond the natural and human-made tragedies that make the news. "Adventures of Nyangi" is available at www.sinc-studios.com, which offers a free demo download.

Tawia contacted Kiriinya during the online promotion of "Adventures of Nyangi," and the idea of inter-country collaboration was born. Tawia is the general manager of Topssoft Computer Services and a computer science lecturer at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, Ghana.

"We realized that making games individually isn't going to help us in any way because of the frustrations and limited game-programming skill set we have in Africa," Tawia said. "In order to make this work, we need to come together and start an African game company that can compete in the global space."

The collaboration will start with simple mobile games since many people in Africa have mobile phones. The mobile-phone market will be the best start for the team before moving to 3D and PC games, Tawia said.

Ghana doesn't have a recognized game development industry, he said. To move in that direction, Tawia wrote his thesis on game development and made a prototype 3D game with his project partner, Francis Dittoh.

Since then, students at the university have studied 3D game design and made games as projects. About five games have been developed from the university since the first one, which Tawia said shows him that game production can become a money-making industry.

Kiriinya and Tawia hope that within five years there will be more game and software developers in Africa.

The collaboration faces challenges from insufficient funding and the lack of well-equipped colleges to train programmers and software developers. Some countries like Kenya do not have clearly stipulated guidelines for software development, and Kiriinya said that many developers there don't realize they need software licenses. The trademark and patenting laws also are not well-developed, and some processes take months before completion, which discourages some developers who may want to protect their work.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.