Every civilised South African will agree that rhino poaching is an abhorrent crime against nature that needs to be stopped. However, southern Africa is a large place and rhino conservation efforts continually struggle against the poachers out to make money from sawing the horns off the poor animals.
With an awareness campaign in mind, and the hopeful goal of donating profits to a rhino conservation charity, a team of Cape Town-based South African developers has set out to create an iOS game to do just that.
Rhino Rumble is planned to be a “forward runner” iOS game that put players in control of Rufus the rhino and his yet-to-be-named human girl companion as they set out to rescue Rufus’ kidnapped baby from poachers.
The game has taken the ambitious approach of using a fully 2D animated game engine with randomised level elements to keep gameplay fresh.
The project is seeking US$95,000 to get Kickstarted, with 30 days on the clock at the time of publication. Developer Tony Scott states that the game will take about six months to develop.
The team is comprised of a 30-year veteran and award-winning lead artist, Riccardo Capecchi, who boasts work on video games The Lion King, Donald Duck in Maui Mallard, and Gargoyles.
The coding, development, project management, and marketing side of things are being taken care of by Tony Scott, Margarida Rainho, and Rogan Louwrens. More about the team can be found on their Rhino Rumble bio page.
A charity and donation percentage should the game prove profitable has yet to be disclosed by the team. Rhino Rumble is a collaboration between Rogue Works LLC (based in the USA) and Capechino Animation (based in South Africa).
To investigate the KickStarter project for yourself, head on over to the website: Rhino Rumble – an iPhone/iPad game with a twist! by Rhino Rumble — Kickstarter
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Hi, folks – a big thank you to James for publishing the story, and to all who added valuable comments. To respond to a few points (sorry for the long post):
– We’ve posted an update to the campaign that talks about what the money is being used for (the 80% left after paying Kickstarter, Amazon & US tax – kinda complicated getting that cash here to spend in SA). Good sound, graphics & dev become very expensive very quickly; we’re just finishing a 30-page animated childrens book app that has around R85,000 in direct costs already, excluding development!
– Kickstarter rules don’t let us talk too much about donating; we’re on thin ice as it is and half expected to be kicked off (no pun):
“No charity or cause funding.
Examples of prohibited use include raising money for the Red Cross, funding an awareness campaign, funding a scholarship, or promoting the donation of funds raised, or future profits, to a charity or cause.”
– We’ll do Android as and when we can; for now this is a native iPad app and a slightly different version for iPhone (the size makes a difference to how you want to interact with the game). The iPad is the ideal platform, even the smaller one, and pretty much owns the tablet market, whereas Android devices are all over the map in terms of consistency and so require many compromises.
– Gameplay will be along the lines of Temple Run, but with some quite unique features. The reason you’re not seeing more is that we haven’t done it yet – wouldn’t need the funding otherwise, would we? 🙂 We’ll try to put out a more illustrative animated sequence shortly.
Meanwhile of course there is no guarantee the kickstarter campaign will work – if it doesn’t we’ll look for another way, but we really want to make this game!
Thanks again for the excellent comments, please keep them coming. And please look out for further updates.
Cheers,
The Rhino Rumble team