What do you get when you bring together a South African coder, a wordsmith and a designer and let them loose to create a classic side-scrolling beat ‘em up game? Boet Fighter pokes fun at derivative fighting games in the vein of the classic Double Dragon.
Put together by the team at Cali4ways Games, Boet Fighter has been, by South African standards, extremely successful, with more than 50 000 downloads on iOS, and was actually ranked as the number one game on iOS in SA and the UK in December.
The game has proven to be particularly successful on the Steam platform for PCs and iOS mobile platform, and is also available on Android. According to company CEO Louis du Pisani, potential players are able to buy the game upfront on Steam, or, alternatively, they can enjoy a sample on mobile, allowing them to try out the first level – after which they have the option to buy the full game.
He suggests that when Boet Fighter was launched, the idea was mostly to make a game the team enjoyed playing and could be proud of. He adds that the concept of monetising it and being successful wasn’t even on the radar at the beginning.
“We viewed it as more of a ‘bucket list’ thing to do, but, when it gained the traction it did, and we found people asking us for media interviews, we realised we had to get offices and start paying salaries. Suddenly, your objectives change, because now there are tangible things that need to be covered. It was at this point that the Cali4ways Games entity was born,” Du Pisani says.
“As for the game itself, our initial idea was Double Dragon with dialogue, with different characters, ideas and comic language. In Boet Fighter, we have two very ‘zef’ and typically South African characters who basically beat up everyone else in the game. Even the name was only a working title, since we felt it was derivative – but we ended up keeping it because, ultimately, the game pokes fun at derivative side-scrollers, so we felt it just worked.”
Our boet is bigger than yours
So where did the game’s traction come from? With no money spent on advertising, Du Pisani says this was mostly created through memes and social media; people ripped the game trailer from YouTube and sent it to friends via WhatsApp.
“To date, we’ve had some 228 000 views, with the trailer still gaining around 1 000 to 1 500 views per day. This was further driven by holding town versus town polls, like, ‘who klaps harder, the okes from Benoni or the boets from Germiston?’ This led to people defending their home towns and the game took off because people became more invested in it.
“More to the point, you get boets like our characters in every town in the world – although they may be called jocks or chavs – but the South African attitude remains that if we held a Boet Olympics, our boets would be superior. South Africans are strange in that we like making fun of boets and, at the same time, we’re ironically proud of them – SA is a beautiful melting pot of contradictions.”
He adds that while the game is violent, the violence has been kept cartoonish and tongue-in-cheek, as they didn’t want any real malice involved.
“Generally, we’re opposed to ‘damsel in distress’ stories, as the damsel isn’t a character, she’s just the excuse to go on a quest, which isn’t cool. So our version parodies this concept, with our ‘hero’ Hard Eddy being the perfect vehicle to make fun of this. In the game, the girl he was chatting up disappears and in his attempt to find her, he thinks anyone coming his way might be complicit in this terrible wrong he must right.
“While he means well, he’s a meathead who essentially does what he would normally do on a Saturday night – klapping his way through everyone, as he’s no detective – and if by accident he rescues the ‘binnet’ (as he refers to her), that’s just a bonus,” says Du Pisani.
Hard Eddy has help from his best mate Mod-C (a play on the term Model C schools), and he basically batters his way through various scenarios, including the gym, a rugby game, busy roads and even a massive rave. The developers aren’t afraid to poke fun at the country either, originally planning a move in the game that causes the screen to go black for a few seconds, before coming back with a message ‘four hours later’. While this dig at Eskom would have erred on the side of humour, rather than being nasty, he points out that a final decision to add it to the game has not yet been taken.
Middle ground
The game was born in May 2018, from the minds of the team from Cali4ways – Du Pisani, Gord Laws and Niekie van Niekerk. Later, Sibusiso Khanyile and Steven Pinto were brought on board – the latter being the silent business nerd, who helped rein in the crazy designers, says Du Pisani.
So what’s next? He says there’s a massive pot of ideas boiling, but the trick will be to find the middle ground between the game they want to make versus the game that will be successful – it’s about striking the balance between creativity and obligation.
“The real challenge for us, even as we try to position ourselves as a quirky, left-field Adult Swim-type game house, is that you never know where the lightning will be, so it’s really hard to position your bottle.”
CALIFORNIA? NO, CALI4WAYS!
Game developers are renowned as ‘creative people’, so it’s not surprising to learn that the concept and idea behind Boet Fighter was the starting point for the business. Cali4ways Games’ Louis du Pisani says it’s normal to come up with the idea behind a game or product first.
“It’s only once you actually begin gaining traction in the market that the business side kicks in and the understanding dawns that in order to make that success meaningful, you need an entity that sits behind the game. When we realised this and decided to name our company, the decision was made in half a second,” he says.
“The idea was to tip our hat to ‘80s game developers California Games, while at the same time poking gentle fun at the northern suburbs of Joburg. I have something of a disdain for Fourways, due to the traffic and the number of okes who are high on protein shakes, and since our game is all about fighting and hitting – something closely related to both muscle-bound gym bunnies and road rage – Cali4ways was the obvious choice. Just because that’s our name doesn’t mean we’re based there: our offices are actually in Randburg, because this area is much more chilled.”
This article was originally published in the March 2020 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.
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