With Playtopia, the annual destination of Indie Games & Immersive Arts festival and conference set to return in 2025, GIA has partnered with the event to share insights from the crop of supremely talented creators in attendance. Next up in a series of speaker interviews is Homolang Marule.

Would you kindly provide some background into who you are, your entry into the games industry and how you came into your current position as a Technical Artist?

I like describing myself as someone who loves using their imagination to solve problems, I have gone into many exercises trying to define myself precisely but this seems to be my common denominator in all the roles I take part in.

 I started in 2019 my second year of study I started as a game designer I did not yet know I wanted to be a technical artist, but I would see my designs not taking visual life the way I imagined them and I would try to work with artist side to drive it closer but that would not be enough and I would try to programmers and they could not cover the gap entirely too, I realized I needed more than just those two skills to start making visuals and art direction make sense to me. That became my start through the journey I only figured out it’s called Technical Artist in 2021 while attending an Activision Blizzard workshop on careers in gaming

As a multi skilled technical artist, how important is such a broad skillset to the various projects you work on and how do you navigate adapting to each role from being a support team member to a team lead?

It all stems from loving to adapt the imagination in the limitations of an engine, I am not the only one who has a vision, right? knowing the struggles of bringing it to life helps me sympathize and word intentions for clients, colleagues and subordinates. Sometimes I work with people who are doing their first job and knowing the struggles I had at the time of starting and looking at our clients delivery date I make a decision to develop a tool that helps them bridge this struggle or I take a longer term approach and try to teach them the things that will chokehold their productivity. Team lead falls onto more than I ask for it so with that one it just comes with understanding enough of both the artistic, engine, and programming side of things to solve more problems for more people than a singular team member should be able to, also engaging the team as a whole across the board means I often have most answers to most questions especially if they pertain to troubleshooting “how are the systems & models interacting to cause this?” for example.

What African based and international technical leads do you look to for inspiration and why do you reference them?

I only have 1 and I can name and the other I must Google and Elyardine (from Freelives) I recently picked up on some months ago, so I have not followed his work for long. The one I will name is Raveen Rajadorai, I like how stylized Hades is, Hades 2 even took it beyond that. It works for its isometric angle and I doubt nothing else, so sometimes when my work doesn’t look good in all the angles I look to that for inspiration, that the best works are made to be an exact fit so it’s not all angles that need to perform perfectly, I look and try to break down how that was achieved for hades they try to reverse engineer it for my context. Worrying about all angles being perfect can waste a lot of development time, especially if the player will never see some of them. The TAs I googled are from Giant Squid games. I have always enjoyed how colourful and seamless their environments transform in their games, no load times, not throttling on prewarm nothing, just a smooth change between two very distinct effects and rendering in the environment. I could probably write an essay here, so I’ll stop myself.

What lessons from the African indie games community do you think the global creative industry should pay attention to?

Innovation! not a new answer I’m sure, how so? I think only smaller budgets local studios are challenged to make something a little new, unique in some respect because they can’t compete on the same playing field with $50m budget games, the quality will struggle to match, so to stay competitive they have to think what can they give that the bigger budget studios may not be thinking to give. This drive for experimentation and innovation to compete I think it’s something more established studios can benefit from. It’s dangerous as they have established IP & projections whereas the African studios are working with less risk of tarnishing a giant franchise with experimentation. But no risk no reward, right? I think last week female UFC featherweight Zhang Weili said “Danger and opportunity sound similar in Chinese” good stuff.

In what ways does Playtopia challenge your understanding of what games or interactive art can be?

Playtopia feels like Da Vincii’s workshop if he had 100 other clones of himself inventing at the same pace in different mediums. I can never think of what to expect from it, which is so exciting, it’s the definition of new. I can never put in a bottle how Playtopia challenges my understanding of the interactive arts, but I think I can comfortably say it makes me think broader every time I see the works on show. I think broader because something I have never seen or thought of before will be there!

What advice would you offer to new entrants to the technical artist profession?

Stop delaying that HLSL even if it’s just basics, it might be useless in most modern applications but that understanding alone will do a lot for you in your daily work especially when you are on the shaders and rendering end of things. Imagine the engine is your co-worker and it does not use your team’s words; you will use words for it often. If it’s legitimately too tense though, report the issue or limitation to Engine support teams and hope you get help, if you don’t have time to wait just explain to management in simple English why their request can’t happen, don’t lose years of your life stressing over it.

Check out the full program and consider joining Playtopia, which will run from December 5th to 6th December 2025 in Cape Town.