Games
One of South Africa's foremost local developers, Ruan Rothman, shares the Free Lives experience
Free Lives is arguably Africa’s most successful Game Development studio. Their games include Broforce, Gorn and Genital Jousting. The independent South African developer, based in Cape Town, has been operating since April 2012. Programmer Ruan Rothman has been with Free Lives since the beginning and shares some of his insights and experience in this chosen career.
What made you decide to pursue a career in game development?
Like lots of people, I grew up playing games and, as a kid, had a dream. It didn’t really seem realistic until around 2010 when (for me) indie games really started to take off, especially with the release of Hotline Miami. I was working as a generic corporate software developer, and thought I’d rather take the risk and do something creatively satisfying where I have some ownership over what I do. I got really lucky by getting hired at Free Lives right as Broforce was started. Besides a love for games, I don’t think there is any other field that combines the technically challenging work of software development with the creative expression of games, and I would really miss either of those if they weren’t present in my job.
The studio’s audience is predominantly offshore. Why do you think this is?
I believe Free Lives is actually Africa’s most successful game dev studio, sales wise. It’s been great to have made some games that resonated with a worldwide audience. In the end though our games are niche games, and that niche tends to be spread around the globe and targeting a geographic niche doesn’t make sense. We also make premium (as in, not free to play/microtransaction) games, and premium games tend to be less popular in Africa.
More than that, Africans just aren’t paying for games, for a variety of reasons. We’ve been waiting for years for someone to make a big African hit and point the way, but it hasn’t happened yet anywhere in Africa and that’s an expensive path to try to blaze. Literally no one has done it, but we would love to see it!
Free Lives has been operating for more than 9 years now. How did the idea for Free Lives start?
Free Lives founder, Evan Greenwood answers this one: Evan had been working at other games studios in South Africa, but wanted to strike out on his own. The original game the studio was going to pursue was called “slice fight”, a mobile zombie cutting game, but it soon became obvious that Broforce was the winning project. Funding is always tricky for something as risky as game development. It’s still tricky in 2021, let alone 10 years ago. We had some months when we were flat broke and borrowing money, but we were lucky that Broforce was such an obvious hit.
The alternative to making our own games was making someone else’s games. And while that’s less of a risk, no one at the studio at the time really had the temperament to cope with that arrangement. The alternative to making games is not making games, which was unthinkable. Fortunately our studio had a happy ending, because we were going to make games until we couldn’t anymore.
Why did you choose to keep Free Lives in South Africa?
We love South Africa, and we don’t really see a benefit in moving the studio as a whole overseas. As an individual it might make sense to look for work overseas, but moving as an established studio doesn’t seem to provide any benefits. In fact, I think we do benefit a lot from having a smaller, closer community, as well as the lower cost of living.
What does it take to make a successful game like Broforce, Gorn or Genital Jousting? Is there a magic ingredient?
I’m not sure there’s any one magic ingredient. One thing we do value very highly is a culture of experimentation and prototyping. Our usual process is just to make as many different jam games and prototypes as we can, release them for free, see which gets the best response, and then pursue from there. After that initial release, we rely on player feedback and loads of iteration. Some people do decide on a game idea and just make it, and some do pull that off, but that’s never really been our method.
I suppose one thing we’ve had in all our games is a big focus on humour. Not just planted, set jokes, but we try to make games that have systems that generate surprising, funny moments. I think that really gives them a unique, lasting charm. Even that, we’re experimenting with - one of our upcoming games, Terra Nil, has a more serious slant to it.
What is the process of developing one of the Free Lives games?
We do a Game Jam, or prototype phase, for a game ranging from 8 hours (Genital Jousting) to several months (like Gorn, or the upcoming Stick It To The Stick Man). If we think it’s cool then we polish it up a little and release it somewhere like itch.io for free. Then we look at the response - if people like it, the team working on it is keen to make it, and we feel we can make it within a reasonable scope, budget and time, we go for it. After that it’s a long iterative grind, usually with the goal of getting it to Early Access. Each project has had some unique elements to it, usually for the prototyping phase there are 2-4 members in the tem, which tends to grow as the game progresses, with Broforce ending up with a team of around 12 at release. Lately we are moving towards running more projects at the same time, currently we have 3 in full production, with smaller teams. With each project we enjoy kidding ourselves and saying that this is going to be a small game finished in a shorter timespan, but in reality it seems that making a game takes about 3 years, for us.
What do you think the South African game development community needs to do to be more noticed by the rest of the world?
I think it would be great to see more studios consistently making games - especially ones who are not predominantly white like we are.
What can we expect from Free Lives in the future?
More games for sure - we currently have three in production: Anger Foot - a fast paced Hotline Miami inspired FPS about kicking in doors and faces while listening to hardbass. Stick It To The Stick Man, a physics based roguelite brawler about beating the shit out of Jeff Bezos, and Terra Nil, a relaxing “reverse city builder” about restoring life in a barren wasteland. We’d also love to see Playtopia back again in 2022, as well as continue to support the local scene where we can.
Any advice for people starting out in game development?
One of the most common mistakes we routinely see people make is that they stick to any one project for too long. When you are starting you really want to get a volume of games done. It is said that your first 10 games will inevitably suck, so get those first 10 out the way ASAP. Although there is great value in getting a game to the stage where a stranger can play it unaided, finishing a game is overrated, finishing the right game is what matters. The game dev scene, both locally and abroad, is very supportive and people don’t reach out for help to established people and studios nearly enough.
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