"I'm not a game designer. I’m a programmer," says Cukia Kimani, one half of the South African dev team on Semblance, a game that demonstrates what might happen if Super Meat Boy were let loose in a world made of Play-Doh.

In Semblance you move from side to side. Your avatar is a squishy pound of flesh with tears flowing down its face. You can flatten the protagonist from either side—making it thinner or smaller—and you can hammer it against the walls of its environment, creating jump spaces and holes.

You collect orbs, smash your way through barriers, and sneak under spike awnings that send you back to the start screen if you touch them. Semblance feels like a game you should be paying for, but it's not finished. It's on display at "A Maze. / Johannesburg," a South African festival for indie developers and digital artists.

"It was a project for school at the time," says Kimani. "But we realised we could do it for real and so we started a company."

Kimani is talking about NyamaKop Games, the indie development studio he set up with Ben Myers in Johannesburg after the pair connected over a GIF on Twitter. Nyama means "meat" in Swahili, and Kop means "head" in Afrikaans. Make of that what you will.

This is how things are supposed to happen in the indie games scene; someone comes up with an idea and then another person in the same space builds upon it. Indie means underground; it's punk rock.

Punk isn't just anti-establishment; it's also DIY, an ideology that doesn't just run against the grain but is where the standard-bearers happen to be outsiders. Even if they don’t know it—even if they don't fully embrace the ethos—it's a movement that exists through the tightness of its community, a community that exists at society's fringes. And in South Africa, indie games are punk rock.

In Europe, the US, and the rest of the first world, video games are firmly on their way to becoming part of mainstream culture. While the medium still receives the odd kicking in newspapers or on TV, games are now as much a part of the accepted cultural datapack as movies, TV shows, and music for millions of consumers of various ages.

Video games are South Africa's punk

In South Africa, however, video games are still an underground movement. The country has only a handful of gaming publications, the medium has hardly any presence in the mainstream media, and, due to the exchange rate between the rand and most foreign currencies (at the time of this writing it sits at just under R14.50 to the US dollar), hardware and software are prohibitively expensive.

Like every movement, the South African gaming industry has its breakout stars—Cape Town-based studio FreeLives scored a hit with its side-scrolling shooter BroForce, for instance—but for the most part, people who play video games in South Africa are still dismissed by the majority, and the indie game scene isn't even on the radar.

"When I tell people I make video games, they look at me like I'm some sort of magician," says Kimani. "They usually ask me if I work overseas after that."

Local devs know that they mostly have only themselves and one another to rely on for help and inspiration. The community is tight-knit—everyone knows everyone—and many devs wear multiple hats. Someone working as a programmer on one project could be QA testing on another or coding on a third.

"There's a spirit of collaboration," says Israeli/Canadian developer Veve Jaffa, one of the attendees at A Maze. "There's a very nice community that moves away from competition that you see in other communities."

"I think the global indie scene shares that vision, but I feel it's stronger here than, say, in America," she says. "People are very protective of their brand and their aesthetic. Here, it's very transparent, and people are very open to sharing their processes and assets. That's very different from what happens in other countries."

The distance between the country's major cities usually makes collaboration hard, but when A Maze rolls around, the different players in the scene converge on Jo'burg.

A Maze is ground zero in South Africa for indie games, but it's not the only gathering that attracts video game fans and curious onlookers. Jo'burg also plays host to rAge, an event where the local distributors of the games industry's biggest triple-A publishers show off demos for games in the pipeline.

rAge has more in common with an expo like E3 or Gamescom. It's a gamer gathering, sure, but it's also a massive advertising space for the industry's biggest players. The attendees are committed to the cause.

While A Maze is one part game festival, one part art exhibit, and one part popup commune and general party zone, it's also geared toward promoting and celebrating the medium as a whole. The festival has grown from a list of game showcases, presentations, and workshops that occupied one building, into a guerrilla event spreading throughout the technology hub of Braamfontein in downtown Jo'burg.

"A Maze is more about raising awareness than it is selling a product," says Kimani. "You have parties, you have exhibits, and you have talks and workshops. The whole idea of what a game can be and what it takes to make a game starts to form for people who come here—because the games here are not perfect."

"Because they’re not perfect it’s easier to connect with," he says. "If you go to E3 or rAge, the games there will make developing games seem so far out of your reach. If you come to A Maze people realise they can make a small, 10-minute experience that people will connect with."

"Once you have a taste, you’ll keep going—and you will get better at doing this."

Listing image by A Maze