Tunisian game developer Walid Sultan Midani under the moniker of his Maltan based studio, Yourun Ltd is celebrating his game Warshmallows winning the Audience Choice Award at Nordic Games Discovery Contest.

Yourun Ltd won the NGDC Season IV qualifier at PlayCon in Malta on 4 October 2019 and fended off stiff competition from among others a South African development team to win the Audience Choice Award.

Speaking on the win, Midani was quick to highlight the importance of the significance of the win. “This is actually cool on 3 levels : First one is the fact that we have an amazing community that supports us in Tunisia, in Malta, in France, in Germany, USA and all over the world and we are very grateful for this. The second point : After more than 2 years of focus and development, this type of awards gives us energy to continue and even to do better and the third one is definitely putting Warshmallows on the map of the games to play in 2021.

Warshmallows is a local and online multiplayer game set in a cute universe that pits players against one another in a battle for supremacy and currently in Early Access on Steam.

Walid Sultan Midani is a veteran game developer with hundreds of games under his belt. After numerous upstarts in his home country he opted to take advantage of Malta’s generous incentives for the game development scene to build his current studio. A move that appears to be paying off.

“We are very proud to say that Warshmallows is developed in Tunisia and published in Malta. We have people in our team that are in 5 different countries and 3 continents. And 80% of our team is from or based in Africa. We deeply believe that the rise of an African champion will boost all the video game industry in our continent. It can be us it can be any other studio. But if it is us we will be very happy. We are leading the way at best as we can making strategic partnerships and accumulating experience that we will be glad to share.”

“The release of the game will happen in 2021. Next step will be to sign a good publishing deal and get ready to port the game on PC, Nintendo Switch, and mobile in the next 6 months.”

Building on fourteen years of organising successful games industry activities, including the annual Nordic Game conference, regional funding programs, overseas networking events and other developer support initiatives, Nordic Game launched the Nordic Game Discovery Contest (NGDC) in 2016 – a competitive challenge where selected game projects are showcased live in pitch competitions at partner events across Europe and around the globe.