Shannon Wadaya, winner of IDFA DocLab Spotlight Award

Through the IDFA DocLab Spotlight Award, IDFA’s new media program continues its joint talent development efforts with the festival Fak’ugesi in Johannesburg. The objective of the award is to boost skills development and build momentum for industry networking. 

With her project Kotamaker, Shannon Wadaya took part in Fak'ugesi's Digital Lab Africa Bootcamp, designed to incubate emerging African talent in creative content (VR, AR, video games, animation, music & digital art) by offering them a springboard to fast-track their project development with the support and expertise of Digital Lab Africa (DLA)'s creative industries ecosystem. IDFA DocLab and the team of Fak'ugesi jointly selected Wadaya as the recipient of the award from the cohort of Bootcamp participants. The award will take her to Amsterdam this coming November for the 37th edition of IDFA. It allows her to attend all new media industry activities, full exhibition program, and special events during the festival, and she will also meet relevant professionals for bespoke meetings.

"With 'Kotamaker,' Nashe Wadaya brings a fresh, culturally rich experience to cooking games. By blending the joy of food with storytelling, she invites players to engage with South African street food in a new way. Wadaya’s vision leaves me hungry for more, and I’m excited to see how she will continue to grow and make waves in the gaming world."
—Nina van Doren (programmer at IDFA DocLab)

"We first came across Nashe's work at her graduation exhibition at the WITS School of Digital Art in 2023 - where she blew the audiences away with her engaging and culturally contextual ‘VR Kota Maker.’ Nashe has continued to develop her work through our DLA program, culminating in pitching and showcasing at this year’s Fak'ugesi Festival. As a bright young star, we believe that the IDFA DocLab Spotlight Award will open doors to new perspectives and experiences at one of the world’s leading new media labs."
—Eduardo Cachucho (creative director at Fak'ugesi & Digital Lab Africa)

Wadaya, whose nickname is Nashe, started out studying computer science, as her family felt this was a field that promised more financial stability. But after the first year and a half, she decided to change paths. "I wasn’t passionate about it, and I wasn’t motivated in my studies. But I knew that I had artistic inclinations, so I went to the School of Arts. They said that I should try digital arts, which came with game design. I found out that I actually really enjoyed making a product that a human being is going to use, and see what experience they have. I really enjoyed the entire problem-solving of trying to create an experience for someone else," she recalls.

In the final year, she started designing the cooking simulator Kotamaker. Kotas are a typical South African street food, consisting of a quarter of a loaf of bread which is stuffed with ham, chips, sausages, and a variety of other ingredients and sauces. The player goes through the process of buying food and then preparing the dish in a food truck, which is designed in a 360 VR environment.

"Based on how long it took you to cook, if you put in the right ingredients, and if you didn't overcook or undercook any ingredients, you get a rating from the person you serve the food to and a tip which ranges from 0 to 10%," she explains, adding that the person served is actually a code built in the back-end of the game.

There are already many cooking simulators designed for smartphones, so Wadaya felt that there wasn’t much room to explore and experiment. "With VR, the interesting thing is taking something you play in 2D and figuring out how to turn it into a 360 experience. That was a bit of a challenge, and in terms of communicating certain information to the user in this environment, all of this brought up something that would be interesting for me to tell." Wadaya explains that she wants to explore ways to make the game more intuitive as opposed to using a lot of on-screen text. She opted for a VR game because she wanted to challenge herself. "I want to make it feel more natural for the player," she says. "All throughout my career I've been making PC games and I'm not a PC game player myself. I play more on console and mobile, so I wanted to try something new," she explains.

The game-developing scene in South Africa—and the continent in general—is not very large, even though it has become a lot bigger in the last ten years. "A lot of the software that we use around the world is made mostly in Europe and in North America. There's an element of not speaking directly to us. As someone who plays a lot of video games, you can see that the storylines, the characters, and the situations are very far from us. So, I always say that I want to make something that speaks to people in South Africa; to people in Africa who don't really get a lot of games or experiences that revolve around things in their day-to-day life. In my case, it's about cooking. But it's specifically about street food that is local to South Africa that a lot of people here will be very familiar with and say, 'Oh, I never thought I’d see this in a video game!'" However, Wadaya believes that her game can have a universal appeal as well, as she is very much invested in cultural inclusivity.

Even though she has a strong technical background in game developing, Wadaya felt she missed some important components in her skill set to really make it in the field. "I joined the DLA Bootcamp because I didn't have any market skills: I didn't know how to pitch my game if I wanted to like make any money, and I also didn't know how to approach collaborators. The art of going out there and networking, collaborating—all this I was hoping to learn about at the Bootcamp. That's what we did every single week. It taught me a lot about the soft skills that I try to put into use." 

"DLA was very helpful to a lot of other young artists who wouldn't have had access to this information easily," she continues, "so I think they've been doing a great job in terms of spreading information and knowledge." However, she still believes there are areas she can improve in—and hopes that coming to IDFA will facilitate this process: "I'm looking to develop ways to talk about my game and describe it in a way that would make sense to any producer, and not just to a co-creator or a lecturer. What I am excited about is being around other artists and seeing how they navigate those spaces. To learn from them, seeing how they talk to potential collaborators about their projects, and how they're able to express the core inspirations. That's a skill that I'm really looking to work on."