The Lost South African Game Developer Interviews Part 3: Danny Day

Friday 26 Feb 2010

A little over a year ago I conducted a series of interviews with a diverse, influential and talented group of developers both from and based in South Africa, which resulted in an article for industry trade site Gamasutra entitled ‘The South African Game Development Scene: Past Present and Future,’ which attempted to look at the history of game development in the country and surmise how an industry may rise and move forward here.

A lot of the interview material was unfortunately left out of the article for reasons of conciseness, and I say unfortunately because almost every response I was given was a gold mine of information and history that could potentially not only benefit aspiring South African game developers, and game developers in other developing nations looking to make a living in this industry, but also inform gaming enthusiasts around the world as to the complexity, and joy, of making videogames under difficult circumstances.

So after lying dormant on my hard drive for a year, I’ve decided to spruce up the interviews, which are just as relevant now as they were then, and start posting them here on El33tonline in a six-part series, continuing today with part three, and an interview with Danny Day (read part one and part two at your leisure).

Danny Day (known as ‘dislekcia’ in the online development community) is the founder and leader of South African game development community Game.Dev and owner of indie game developer QCF Design (which stands for Quarter Circle Forward), and has been creating and developing games in different forms for most of his life, finding his first great success with the innovative and stylised multiplayer shooter, Monochrome.

Ater working at a variety of contract jobs and studying during his teens to early twenties, Day founded Game.Dev and had a brief stint as a network programmer at South African developer, I-Imagine, working on Final Armada.

While doing much to encourage the local game development community and advocate its growth, Day founded QCF Design with the intention to focus on the development of original, smaller-in-scope independent games on a variety of platforms, as well as work on contract advergames, and continues to grow the Game.Dev community with regular development competitions (such as the recent Competition 24 dealing with the theme of ‘Coherence’) and meet-ups (a good example being the community’s gathering at rAge 2009).

Day has been extremely busy since I corresponded with him regarding the interview, so where I can, I’ve included more recent information (that he was kind enough to send my way) after each relevant question to bring you up-to-date.

Let’s begin the interview:

Q: Could you please state your name, current position and official title

Danny Day. I’m Chief Pants Wrangler at/owner of QCF Design. I’m also the Community Leader of Game.Dev.

Q: What first got you interested and excited about games and game development?

Danny Day: My parents had a tendency to look for the enjoyment in practically anything, effectively turning an arduous task into a game by adding a reward or keeping track of improvement.

I naturally kept doing that as I grew up and discovered that I liked making similar experiences for my friends: Drawing mazes, new playground games, etc. The first time I was exposed to programming, a game was the only thing I wanted to make.

Q: What initial steps did you take in order to be working in the field of games and game development?

DD: During school I read as much as I could about game techniques and tried to reproduce what I saw in the games I played. C++ was alien to me then, we only had access to Turbo Pascal formally. Pretty much everything I’ve learned is self taught or discovered with the aid of friends interested in the same things.

Q: Was your education path influenced by the availability of specialised courses in South Africa at the time?

DD: No. There was nothing game-related available while I was at school. I didn’t even consider game development an option for “What I wanted to do when I grew up”, I just enjoyed games and spent a lot of time on them. Games were something that “hindered” your progress at becoming a productive human being…

Later at university I had more of an idea that I wanted to make games for a living, so I diversified my Computer Science degree and took courses in Visual Arts, English Literature, Human/Computer Interface Design, Physics, Psychology, anything that I could imagine would be useful for a designer.

Q: Did you think or know that there was a demand for game development skills at the time in South Africa, or was it simply something you were interested in?

DD: There was no demand for game development skills while I was growing up. The only company we’d ever heard of at the internet café I spent most of my time in was Celestial and we knew they had 3 jobs each just to pay rent. I-Imagine started popping up in rumours but we knew nothing about the place. Game development wasn’t a career, it was a dream. I still don’t really believe that I earn my living doing this…

Q: What in the way of game and software development were you involved with prior to your current work at QCF and Game.Dev?

DD: Like pretty much everyone else, I had no idea what to do after school so I took a gap year. After an argument in a bar I ended up interning at a VR research centre to prove that games were specialised VR applications. One month we’d be down a mine learning all about coal so that we could write safety simulations, another we’d be learning about ancient hominid fossils in the Sterkfontein caves. At one point I’d have been mapping out shipwrecks around the South African coast, but the centre shut down and I appreciated the irony of being retrenched at 19.

A computer science degree seemed like a good idea, so I signed up at the University of Pretoria while starting a company with a couple ex-VR colleagues. Naledi3D built custom “VR” simulations on desktop PCs for training and education. Eventually I couldn’t handle the interminable crunches and going from work to lectures to work again without seeing home got unbearable. So I left N3D and focused on my degree and only toyed with a couple of start-up ideas in my spare time while doing freelance IT journalism to pay bills.

I accidentally founded Game.Dev after a good friend started writing for NAG, a local gaming magazine. The forums needed content and a game development competition seemed like a good idea. Things snowballed from there, soon I was running to keep up with what the community wanted to do. One of the games I built for the community, Monochrome, got me some work at I-Imagine building the networking for a PSP title [Final Armada] their publisher was insisting on (the original was a PS2 title, hence no networking).

I learned a lot at I-Imagine, even got some of my design prototypes pitched at E3 [Electronic Entertainment Expo] in 2006, but the company went into hibernation and I moved on to being gainfully unemployed.

Q: What lead to the establishment of QCF?

DD: After I left N3D, I kept getting various consulting contracts that were vaguely game-related. Never straight development, but often advising on how something might be made more entertaining to use or how a game-approach might be relevant. Once Game.Dev had been going for a while, the contracts became more overtly game design-oriented: I worked on an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) designed to help disenfranchised children across Africa, I built boardgames to teach road safety lessons to comic book readers, etc.

Eventually I needed a structure that this consulting could fall under, so I incorporated and started Quarter Circle Forward Design. Our first game, MathsterMind, evolved out of a Game.Dev sponsored competition on learning via games. The sponsor wanted to use one of the winning game ideas in a pilot project using cellphones in maths education. The guy who built the game was still in school, so QCF worked with him to produce a mobile game based on his concept.

DD: QCF’s proudest moment so far came in November [2008] when our DreamBuildPlay entry, Spacehack, made it into the competition’s top 20 games. I was very surprised that a prototype with no sound was able to compete with the very polished and professional top DBP entries. It proved we’re onto something interesting with the concept…

Having loads of people play our game at the rAge expo recently [October 2008] and seemingly enjoying it was also something of a moment, as was having a TV crew interview us in our lounge (we work from home) about the game and local development.

Game.Dev has had some neat moments too: Handing out giant cheques to competition winners because they made cool games is something I won’t forget anytime soon, as is the yearly craziness that somehow ends up coalescing into a game development conference during the rAge expo.

Spacehack Trailer

[Current Update] QCF Design, specifically, has had several other proud moments since Spacehack’s entry into DreamBuildPlay, as Day explains:

“Since the interview we spent a chunk of the year working with the World Bank Institute, injecting the idea of ARGs into their approach to social entrepreneurship and wrangling educational material. The WBI brought in Jane McGonigal’s Avantgame to design and run the resulting ARG and they’re launching very soon.” [Find out more at UrgentEvoke.com]

Day continues: “We also built a relationship with ad agencies via a cellphone marketing company and have started producing mobile advergames in Flash Lite for brands that want to do something different on cellphones. Our puzzle game for Colgate pulled over 60K minutes of gameplay off of a month’s worth of in-store promotion (tiny stickers on posters) and gave away just under R20K worth of airtime to players.”

“We still get people playing the game solely off word of mouth and our session-length is an astounding 8 minutes per play session - that’s unheard-of on phones.

“On top of all of that, we moved QCF down to Cape Town at the end of last year and are now firmly ensconced, looking for an artist or two to complement the team. We also rocked out at the Global Game Jam at UCT (University of Cape Town) recently, which was a ton of fun.” (Check out QCF Design’s game entry into the Jam, YouDunnit.)

Additionally, Day says that “[last] year we were able to earn enough to fund a game entirely on our own, so we’ve hit that indie dev dream in 2 years. Pretty proud of that!” This no doubt helped the team hire on an additional member, and a star of the local game development scene, Rodain ‘Nandrew’ Joubert. [End of Current Update]