Born to Accomplish Historical Feats; A moment with the founders of N’Ganin Games
A random individual born to accomplish historical feats is how he describes himself. Kevin Lohore is a 25-year-old digital artist, animator, comic artist, writer, game developer, concept designer, storyboard artist, and entrepreneur from Ivory Coast.
As a big Manga and video games fan, Kevin was initiated into art at the age of four through his admiration for his brother’s drawing abilities. He used to imitate his brother’s style by drawing Dragon Ball Z art and other famous franchises. In the end, though, the Ivorian artist decided he no longer wanted to just imitate when he could make his ideas come to life by creating his own characters, universes, stories, and comics.
“My brother and I also used to design board games and our own figurines to play with our friends and cousins when our parents locked our game consoles. We kept creating mechanics for anyone to enjoy, which we kept sharpening each day,” Lohore stated.
After obtaining his Baccalaureate, Kevin decided to step into the IT world, leading him to take part in diverse training in the fields of networking, software engineering, and graphic design. And although his works were impressive, the animator still felt his place was unfound.
“I noticed my place was still unfound. The creative world inspired me so much at some point that I couldn’t even spend a day without drawing. It was then that I realized how much I could accelerate Africa’s rising through creativity, commitment, passion, and skill exploration. Then my brother and I decided to raise a new era together, with him specializing in programming, and me specializing in art,” the designer spoke on.
The two would go on to complete several Udemy courses, obtain numerous certificates in their respective fields, watch, learn, assess Mangas and animations, and play different types of games. They would also study from YouTube tutorials and any other informative sources in order to sharpen their skills The two did this to examine their design failures, elaborate potential solutions to fix them, to enable them to learn enough to cover for an entire team’s expertise.
Afterward, Kevin and his brother deemed it time to introduce their independent and self-funded game development startup known as N’Ganin Games; “The African Game Changers Rising”, and started sharing their exotic vision of Africa Gaming.
N’Ganin Games’ ideology, with Fulgence Lohore as its founder, mainly focuses on showcasing Africa through its smartness and creativity by turning very banal and simple concepts into fully unpredictable masterpieces, and Primal Force Arena is their first revolution letter to spread.
Primal Force Arena is an authentic online multiplayer PVP featuring an intensive, tactical, and psychological battle system aiming to offer gamers worldwide an experience never seen before.
“Its concept creation originated from us having some critical observation of the Tic Tac Toe classic concept. We found many down points making the game logic too linear and quickly boring after a few plays. Players battling in tic tac toe are prone to only enjoy victory cases which are very rare depending on their expertise and are mostly called to end up on a draw result if both tactics are on par, and these sadly kill the game dynamic and richness. So we decided to use the “align 3” aspect as the fundamental rule of our game to accredit this immortal memory, while shaping a completely new way to fix defaults we could spot through its old-school version according to our expectations,” Lohore explained the dynamics of the game.
Primal Force Arena, despite its young age and the brothers’ late start with its publications this year, currently counts hundreds of downloads, 90 actual users, and overwhelmingly positive reviews. Primal Force Arena Beta version is currently available on the Play Store and App Store. Apart from his personal project, Kevin currently contributes to Leti Arts’ development games which are also available on the Play Store and App Store.
Furthermore, the brothers are working on an educational comic dedicated to sensitizing the youth upon mistakes to carefully avoid for a much better and optimized new generation vision and output.
“Although we are involved in many beautiful games and projects both internally and externally, Primal Force Arena remains the flag keeping our heads higher. Making a game with passion and freedom may easily be compared to a mother giving birth, and nurturing the child with priceless love in hopes of seeing the child grow beautifully. That is Primal Force to us and we expectantly await to witness the game’s growth and beauty,” the founders told Leti Arts.
Diving into the game development world is a pretty tough path, especially in Africa but is worth the sacrifices. Kevin shares that game development has shown him the real path to his destiny. The creative emphasizes that he is able to make people smile, think creatively, etc. by utilizing his creative abilities.
He also shares that game development should not just be a hobby but must be used as a tool to bolster societal solutions.
“I would honestly dissuade any individual wishing to venture into game development just for hobby purposes as using our abilities just to satisfy our individual needs is a block to our societal progress. In order to achieve a goal in this industry, I primarily advise anyone who feels ready to fall, and stand back, to train both their body and their soul. However, they must remember that no one can help them attain that goal except themselves.”
For any game developer to stay afloat his game, “ they must Check their social media profiles (mainly LinkedIn) daily and reach out to gaming news platforms newsletters such as Premortem Games or Games Industry Africa and keep their eyes out for the latest games releases. Testing games is also one good way of keeping up with trends.”
Wrapping up, the young developers said “Africa-themed games have become Africans’ sole dream, but they still believe copying Western concepts and adding a few African masks and symbols makes a respectful or honorable game, and adding a few stories related to culture is what brings value to Africa.”
“They earn a lot and invest less, they go by calculations and forget creators, they avoid the world competition lurking behind “African folklore”, and create games for people to invest in, but forget that no one would ever invest in something they do not deem worthy.
“ Most Africans do not invest in their local projects, but they invest a lot in exotic game. They keep dulling upcoming generations with the fallacious dogma stating ‘just make games’. But we must remember that building a solid and sustainable ecosystem in Africa Gaming primarily relies on how much quality we are all willing to offer. We will not make any progress by producing weak-minded projects and wearing ‘equipment lack’, ‘African culture’ and other similar stained jackets to cover our low effort but big expectations.
“Let us genuinely love what we do, prioritize users’ concerns when playing our games so that Africans and the world do not play African games for mere support purposes and then select a Western game as their favorite. Such mentality is N’Ganin Games’ unavoidable roadmap”
