At just 17, Lerato Mothata has spent nine years making games. His latest release, Rogun – Army, draws inspiration from the local multiplayer experiences he enjoyed growing up and aims to get a new generation of players interacting beyond their screens.
South African game developer Lerato Mothata, who publishes his games under the name ForbiddenBoX, has released Rogun Army, a free-to-play mobile game designed to bring friends together through offline multiplayer sessions. At 17 years old, Mothata already has nine years of game development experience and hundreds of projects behind him, making his latest release another milestone in an unusually early start to his development career.
Available on the Google Play Store, Rogun Army is a LAN-based, offline couch party game that can be played solo or with more than 16 players.
Mothata’s journey into game development began with a familiar source of inspiration: playing games with family. Growing up, he spent considerable time gaming with his father, who encouraged him to create as much as he consumed. That advice prompted Mothata to look beyond the games themselves and begin asking how they were made.
Already comfortable using computers from around the age of six or seven, he found the transition into basic game development relatively natural. He started with Scratch, using the platform to create simple games and develop his problem-solving and programming skills.
By the age of eight, however, he was ready for more advanced tools. “I started off using Scratch to create basic games which gave me a good foundation for problem solving and coding,” Mothata explained. “As my needs grew Scratch became more of a limitation which led me to switching to Unity at the age of 8 (2016).”
Since then, he says, he has created hundreds of projects, with varying degrees of success. Rogun Army is also not his first published application on Google Play. Before developing the game, he released a messaging app and a timer app, both of which were subsequently unlisted following issues associated with updates.
His current development workflow centres on the Unity game engine and C#, with projects targeting mobile devices and PCs. The idea behind Rogun Army emerged from Mothata’s own experience with Mini Militia – Doodle Army, a game that allowed friends to host multiplayer sessions without an active internet connection.
Over time, however, he felt that updates to Mini Militia changed the qualities that had originally made the game special. By 2025, he had come to realise that he was not alone in that assessment, with other teenagers and young adults expressing similar nostalgia for the experience.
Rather than simply wishing for that style of game to return, Mothata decided to create his own. “I created Rogun Army to solve a problem,” he said, describing his motivation to recreate the kind of accessible, offline multiplayer experience he and his peers had enjoyed.
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