What It's Like To ... Be an Independent Game Developer from Nigeria
Tade Ajiboye spent 2 years single-handedly building Go North, a cozy maze adventure designed for the global market, with the hope of encouraging African game players to value locally developed games.
Nelson C.J.NelsonC.J.Lagos-Based West Africa Correspondent
“I hope it has a ripple effect where it lets the consumers know that if they are keen enough, they can find very good games made by us.”courtesy of Tade Ajiboye
Although he didn’t always know which stories he wanted to tell or how he would tell them, Tade Ajiboye has always wanted to be a storyteller. Ajiboye, who initially wanted to be an electrical engineer before transitioning to game development, soon realized he could tell stories through video games. “There was never really a plan to build games. I just wanted to tell stories,” he tells OkayAfrica. Ajiboye, who also used to be a writer, says he is drawn to a good story, regardless of genre. “As long as it's very good writing and it's like a captivating story, I'm sat.”
It is this eye for good, engaging storytelling that he applied to his first video game, Go North. Now available on Xbox, Ajiboye’s Go North is a cozy maze-adventure game that he built all by himself. It is an incredible feat for an independent game developer from Nigeria — a country whose game development industry remains sorely underinvested, even though over 46.6 million Nigerians are active video game players. Despite this number, there are few local game development companies whose games have permeated the market, and most gamers often lean towards games developed by companies in the U.S. and U. Even the wider African game development ecosystem is still largely developing. With Go North, Ajiboye hopes to change that.
Ajiboye describes Go North as a narrative-driven game with twists and turns. According to the official game description, “Dara begins her journey with a singular purpose: to Go North, meet the Maze God and have her undying wish granted. She must navigate countless mazes and labyrinths purposefully crafted by the Maze Makers to test her perseverance. But something sinister seems to be corrupting the mazes. Something… or someone.”
As someone who grew up playing Pokémon, Ajiboye hopes to create something that Nigerian gamers will value, engage with, and celebrate just as well. Below, Ajiboye talks about his journey into game development, the difficulties of breaking into international game markets as a Nigerian living in Nigeria, his hopes for Go North, and what it means to be an independent game developer in an infantile industry.
The first game I played as a kid was Pokémon. My siblings and I also had the PlayStation One and the Game Boy Advance, and we had Pokémon FireRed on it and fell in love with that. There's just something about choosing your team, catching different Pokémon, and training or raising them to high levels and then battling. Selecting which ones you're going to train to be as strong as they can and then the actual battling was the most fun part because it's very intricate. I also played Harry Potter, Assassin's Creed, Naruto, FIFA, etc.
I can't say I always wanted to be a game developer; I had a lot of different interests, and I was also pretty good at them. Over the years, I learned how to build games at a boot camp my parents sent me to, and then I built a game for Android and iOS called Water Bubble, which generated a lot of interest online. So, people started reaching out to me to build games for them: science, media companies, etc. And so, I continued, and that kind of has developed to what I do now.
Before building Go North, I was working on a game where you play as a mosquito and try to suck blood from humans. While building that, I also decided to build a game for myself on the side: a peaceful exploration game set in mazes. You walk around beautiful mazes, you're immersed, and you discover things. I also knew I wanted to tell a story, so I started thinking about what I wanted to accomplish with it, aiming to make my audience emotionally attached to the main character.
In building the game, I started with the prototype to make sure people would even enjoy it. I realized that people thought it was like a race, which goes against the entire point of this game. I needed to make people feel okay getting lost in and finding and discovering things. So I went back to the drawing board and decided to focus more on the art of the environment. I also needed to populate it with enough side quests, interactions, obstacles, and puzzles to make each level intimate, personal, and exciting. For the concept art, I commissioned an artist, and I created some of the other characters that need to exist, like the maze makers. There's one for each type of maze. There's also a meadow maker that creates peaceful meadow mazes. The forest maker, which makes the more wooded forest-type mazes. The sky maker, where you have the sky islands and all of that. I built the entire game, but I contracted out some work, like concept art, 3D models, and music, so there's amazing music in each level.
“I needed to make people feel okay getting lost in and finding and discovering things.”courtesy of Tade Ajiboye
In all of this, I'm also marketing the game; I'm applying to showcases and festivals and doing all the necessary things to ensure the game gets in front of people who might play it, as I am an independent developer. It's been like two years of just building this. After freelancing for most of my career, building games and VR experiences for other people, I had to pour all my attention into Go North. The time and all the money I would have made if I hadn't been building this were worth the sacrifice. Nigeria is an interesting place to be an independent game developer. I'm not limited to the Nigerian market or the African market for Go North — my target audience has always been global. I'm building a game that I hope can compete on a global stage and stand beside all the other indie games out there. And I think that would change when we start to see successful indie games. If Go North does well globally, I think Nigerians also love to appreciate things that have already succeeded.
I hope it has a ripple effect, letting consumers know that if they are keen enough, they can find very good games made by us, and also showing other aspiring developers that this is possible. I also hope it's some proof that we have some of the talents required to do this. Yeah. Because I made sure that I contracted the concept and the music to local people in Nigeria, proving that we have the individual parts to make a great game.
There are definitely a bunch of challenges unique to you as a Nigerian game developer, but the first major one is the restrictions on publishing on certain platforms. Steam, for instance, which is the biggest PC platform for games, you can't create a Steam developer account as a Nigerian without knowing someone. Nigeria is just not on their list of options to select when you're creating your developer account. I don't know the reasons for any of this, but that's just one massive hurdle. It gets crazier because even for consoles like PlayStation and Nintendo Switch, you also cannot create developer accounts as a Nigerian.
There just aren't many people who have solved some of the problems we have here. And for instance, going to market, publishing on a global scale, localization all of these things are just not things we've hacked in the industry. So it's just difficult when you're trying to figure this out for the first time. Even things like knowledge sharing or technical problems, there aren’t many people or communities I can speak to for help or solutions. There are a lot of smaller communities on Discord channels where you can talk to people who have the answers to these questions, but these aren’t people from Nigeria. Ultimately, I would like to tell stories that move audiences emotionally. Could be high levels of excitement or sadness, or just a strong emotional shift.
