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For decades, Africa’s creative industries have been described through what they lack — infrastructure, funding, access, visibility. But across the continent, a new generation of artists, designers, programmers, and storytellers has been quietly building something else: new worlds.
Among them is Cukia “Sugar” Kimani, a Kenyan-born game developer and digital artist whose work sits at the intersection of technology, storytelling, and imagination. His practice challenges the idea that games are simply entertainment. Instead, they become spaces for experimentation — places where artists can construct new realities, invent new systems, and create cultural experiences that travel beyond borders.
From Player to Creator: Becoming One of the “Magicians Making the Magic”
Reimagining What African Games Can Become
Cukia “Sugar” Kimani remembers the first time he encountered a digital world that felt alive.
As a child, discovering games was not only about playing. It was about witnessing possibility — the realization that someone had designed the characters, environments, rules, and experiences unfolding on the screen.
“From the moment I put it on and saw the magic on the screen, I knew I had to become one of those magicians making the magic.”
That moment became the beginning of a practice built around curiosity, experimentation, and invention.
Today, Kimani is a creative engineer, game director, and digital artist whose work explores the relationship between technology, play, and storytelling. With a background spanning computer science, mathematics, and digital arts, his practice moves between code and creativity — treating technology not simply as a tool, but as a medium for imagination.
The Artist as World Builder
Building Soft Worlds, Digital Futures, and New Possibilities for African Games
Kimani’s entry point into the industry was technical — degrees in Computer Sciences, Mathematics, and Digital Arts — but his sensibility has always been something harder to teach: an instinct for play that refuses the obvious, and a willingness to strip a genre down to its most essential, most joyful parts.
That instinct announced itself early. Boxer, co-created with game designer Ben Crooks, is a top-down boxing game that dispenses with footwork, pacing, and all the strategic patience the genre usually demands, and hands the player exactly what they came for — the punch. The game won the inaugural A MAZE./Johannesburg Award in 2015, and it remains a clear statement of intent: Kimani is interested in form, in what a game assumes it must contain, and in the irreverent freedom that comes from questioning those assumptions.
“From the moment I put it on and saw the magic on the screen, I knew I had to become one of those magicians making the magic.”
A World Made of Playdough
That spirit found its fullest expression in Semblance, the debut title of Nyamakop, the independent studio Kimani co-founded alongside Ben Myres in Johannesburg. A puzzle platformer built on a single radical premise — that both the character and the world they inhabit are made of pliable material, deformable by the player — Semblance took one of gaming’s most saturated genres and asked what would happen if its fundamental rules were soft.
The result was a game that felt genuinely new: shown at major festivals worldwide, recognized with an Excellence in Game Design award at BitSummit in Kyoto, and lauded by Polygon as coming from “one of the most promising studios in African game development.” Most significantly, Semblance made history as the first African IP to launch on a Nintendo platform — a milestone that landed not just as industry news but as proof that African studios could compete, on their own creative terms, in the global market’s most prestigious spaces.
Nyamakop’s trajectory earned Kimani a Forbes Africa 30 Under 30 recognition in 2018 for his role building the studio as its technical director.
Speaking the Industry Into Existence
Semblance made history as the first African IP to launch on a Nintendo platform — proof that African studios could compete, on their own creative terms, in the global market's most prestigious spaces.
Kimani has since moved into a new chapter. He now runs ALL DAY ALL NIGHT, a small independent studio he operates with his partner Henrike “Riker” Lode, dedicated to prototyping new game ideas in various states of completion — from quick sketches to more fully formed concepts — and sharing that process publicly through short devlog-style videos on TikTok. It is a deliberate shift in scale, away from the institutional ambitions of studio-building and toward something more immediate: the act of making, documented in real time, offered as both process and invitation.
When Games Become Something Else
Alongside his game development work, Kimani has consistently explored the space where games blur into other forms. A collaborative installation with sound artist Yann Seznec, developed as part of the British Council Connect ZA 2018 programme, brought together MIDI data from live music and generative algorithms to produce a digital painting in real time — creating permanent visual artifacts from ephemeral sound. It is a gesture that speaks to something consistent in Kimani’s practice: the conviction that play and interactivity are not genre-specific, and that the digital image is always, in some sense, alive.
The Method Behind the Magic
Making Arguments Through Play
What distinguishes Kimani across all of this work is not a fixed aesthetic but a method — a recurring willingness to locate the assumption buried inside a familiar form and ask, with real curiosity, what happens when you remove it. Boxer strips boxing to contact. Semblance makes the world itself the puzzle. Even his TikTok devlogs reframe what a studio practice can look like: not a polished retrospective but a live, unguarded process, shared before the outcome is known.
An Industry Reshaped
In that, Kimani is doing something more than making games. He is making an argument about what games are for, who gets to make them, and what the map of global game development looks like when African studios stop being the footnote and start being the headline.
A New Studio, A Smaller Scale
Semblance made history as the first African IP to launch on a Nintendo platform — proof that African studios could compete, on their own creative terms, in the global market’s most prestigious spaces.
Kimani’s work at Nyamakop was never only about the games themselves. His appearances on international stages — GDC, A MAZE./Berlin, Respawn — established him as both a practitioner and an advocate, someone interested in the story of how African games get made and what it costs and means to make them. This dual role, as builder and narrator of the industry he was building, gave his career a dimension beyond craft: a deliberate effort to make African game development legible, aspirational, and real to audiences who had not thought to look for it.
