Raven Illusion Studio started as a freelance studio five years ago by Precious Rhogho but only became a legal entity last year, with six team members distributed across the world in countries such as the UAE, Kenya, and primarily in Lagos, Nigeria. Recently, they released their first-ever major title as a fully registered entity called Adventurers – Path to Greatness, and this release alone has taught them more about the gaming industry in Africa and beyond, than they did during the development process itself.

To start with, in an interview with Precious, he identified funding as one of the major challenges they had to deal with during the development process of the game. On this, Precious said:

“One of the main challenges we face, particularly here in Africa, and something that other game developers on the continent also encounter, is funding. Game development isn’t a part-time endeavor; it’s a highly competitive field that demands significant time investment.

To stay competitive, you can’t afford to spend seven years on a single project. The market is too fierce for that. Speed is crucial; you must dedicate ample time to your projects. However, approximately 90% of indie developers don’t generate income from their projects, meaning you’re committing 100% of your time to something that won’t yield returns for the first three years or more. It’s difficult to achieve a sustainable income from it. Consequently, most developers juggle part-time jobs while working on their projects.”

On the issue of funding, Precious, for example, had to navigate this through part-time work as a freelancer on platforms such as Fiverr and Upwork to support the development of the game, and at some point, he had to work part-time at other gaming studios for this game, Adventurers – Path to Greatness, to come to life.

Finally, the game came to life on the 20th of February, 2024!

THE ADVENTURERS

In short, the game is about Mansa Musa, one of the richest men to ever exist, and the aim is to inspire gamers to be ambitious like Mansa. The game, which is divided into Five Episodes, starts with gamers’ characters tasked with finding Mansa’s treasure in Mali with the help of a compass. However, like every treasure hunt, they have a rival named General Kharkov, whom they have to overcome to get to the treasure.

What is most interesting about this game is the educational aspects, as gamers ordinarily will start with the sole goal of getting the treasure for themselves, but along the line, they will encounter experiences that will teach them about impact and uplifting the community in Africa. A perfect example is gamers having to use their in-game currency to pay for the fish a girl stole at a fish market in Mali because she was hungry.

In explaining why this educational aspect was included, Precious said:

“In the end of the game, players use the treasure they found to help people in Africa, build schools, provide running water across Mali, and have others start charity organizations to help children and all. So that’s the main message we try to pass: it’s not all about money. It is not all about greed. It is about service and giving back.”

Another notable thing about the game is the usage of pictures from Google Earth to capture the environment in places such as Somalia, Mali, and Venice in Italy that were featured in the game.

THE LAUNCH OF THE GAME AND LESSONS LEARNT

The launch of the game was a mixed story, according to Precious. On one hand, it was not much of a success locally and in Africa, as out of 18,000-plus downloads recorded for the game so far, only about 500 have come from Nigeria, and this was against the backdrop of spending so much money on local influencers to get the game out.

However, outside Africa, the game was received well in gaming markets such as India, Russia, and Brazil. They also got traffic from the United States. Globally, the game was also trending on YouTube, as a lot of streamers with millions of followers were posting the game, doing reviews, doing the walkthrough, and all. That really helped them to reach this number of players in less than 20 days; those YouTube reviews, and they did not have to pay these influencers.

Another thing that helped make the game trend is because the game has a similar theme to Uncharted, and a lot of players love Uncharted.

The downside, however, of your mobile game blowing up in these markets is the issue with LOCALIZATION, which they never took seriously during the development of the game but only saw the need at the point of launch. Their top users in these countries did not speak English but loved the concept around the game and who wouldn’t? It is a game about one of the richest African men to exist, named MANSA MUSA. It became even more imperative for localization to be taken seriously, as the players wanted to interact with the game in their own language, and this led to some bad ratings initially for the game. For example, the players in the Arabic-speaking areas wanted their in-game tags to be in Arabic, but the game server did not recognize this, which led to login problems.

To remedy this in time, they had to rely on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and specifically, ChatGPT, to translate over 3,000 game storyline scripts into different languages. If not for ChatGPT, this process would have taken nothing less than 3-6 months to be completed manually through translators, but they did not have this luxury of time, since the game was already launched.

However, localizing with ChatGPT is not as rosy as people would like to imagine. The developers had to manually insert the storyline into an excel spreadsheet, and from there, inserted everything into ChatGPT for translation, and the translated words had to be affixed to each relevant area of the game. Through this method, they were able to translate the game into 11 different languages (French, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Russian, Indonesian, and Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, Indian, and Arabic). Before this localization was done, their game ratings were below 2.5 on major stores, but after implementing this localization change, they started to average five-star ratings.

REVENUE

As previously mentioned, only about 500 of their downloads/player base came from Nigeria or even Africa in less than 20 days of launching, as about 13,000+ came from countries/regions outside of Africa, and given their freemium mode, in which they largely depend on in-game ads for revenue, that is a huge advantage for them.

However, the majority of the downloads come from Android users in the Tier 3 game ads market, and this further reduces how much they should be making, as it would be much higher if they got these downloads on iOS devices in a tier 1 market such as the USA, for example.

MOVING FORWARD

The studio looks to capitalize on the success of their initial game title and has been displaying it at gaming exhibitions in Nigeria. Going forward, they have realized a painful but important lesson about localization and the need to actually create a striking balance between the focus on local versus international.

With respect to the issue of funding, Precious is of the opinion that a consolidation of talents amongst indie studios could help cushion this since it might be possible to work on much larger projects and spare time. The release of the adventurers also taught them the importance of gaming in the exportation of African culture, as was the case with Mansa Musa.

The Adventurers is available to download from Google Play and from the website.