Game on!

Gaming is one of the world’s largest entertainment earners, garnering a global market value of US$198.40 billion as of 2021.

Not only does the industry help push the development of virtual technologies, but it also has massive potential for education and the capacitation of young technologists, with its fun approach to learning digital skills.

While there are many players in the "coding-for-kids" environment, game development is still a niche sector locally. However, a group of young Namibians are taking aim at growing game development and taking it to the next level.

Among them is 28-year-old Tutaleni Ilonga, who, along with Vaughan Weiss, co-founded Edu-Game Namibia, an organisation that offers game development courses to school students with the aim of getting them to create games that address issues around them.



Ready player 1!

Growing up as a passionate gamer, his career in game development really took off in 2019 through a programme called 'Enter Africa', where he learnt about how his favourite industry functions.

"The programme allowed me to obtain knowledge on how the game development industry works and exposed me to the possibilities and networks that we can leverage to learn and grow our local industry," he explained.

"I do not only want to help stimulate the game development market in Namibia, but also create a market where everyone can benefit financially and gain future-proof skills," he added.

Edu-Game Namibia was established to complement his other initiative, Tura Life (TL) Entertainment, a tech company that was started with the aim of promoting Namibian culture through gaming, technology and comic books.

In 2020, they developed their first two successful games; ‘Cassette Roulette’, a puzzle game about music, and ‘Mkaguzi Saude’, a Covid-19-centred adventure game, where players are health inspector characters who are appointed to visit different residential areas to find and cure as many patients as possible, using a limited supply of medical resources stored in a special 'Medicine Bazooka'.

Currently in the works by Ilonga and his team at TL Entertainment is ‘Explorium’, which is currently in beta testing, the second phase of software testing in which a sampling of the intended audience tries the product out.



Levelling up

In addition to their development and youth-focused training work through Edu-Games at the Village in Liliencron Street, Windhoek, the team also engages like-minded developers and organisations to share knowledge, best practices and expose Namibian games and gamers to the world.

In October 2022, they hosted the 2022 edition of the game development marathon 'GameJam Namibia' in conjunction with the global "GameJam " event, where participants create games from scratch.

The initiative serves as an incubator for talent, an industry accelerator that aims to "empower the best games to become marketable products, attractive to investors."

Ilonga said the "game development marathon’s main goal is to foster this niche creative industry with new games and companies, uniting the strength and interests of different developers’ hubs across the world, highlighting the potential of independent games and promoting the concept of games as a business."

He added: "We are excited to announce that we partnered with Esports Africa News (EAN) and they covered GameJam Namibia, truly helping us reach a global audience."

Co-founder of EAN, Gabriel Atsu Sikanku, said: "Esports Africa News is glad to be partnering with such a prestigious entity to host an event that lines up with our goals as an organisation. This is part of the effort to showcase and promote talent and content from Africa."

For more info, contact them at [email protected], and if you're not based in Windhoek, no problem, they offer online courses too.