What we set out to build, why we couldn't, and what we make instead.
Karibu Studios is Joseph Gift Masibo and Rightson Tole. We're software engineers at Glitex Solutions and we built Karibu around that work, over several years, teaching ourselves game development a piece at a time.
We say that plainly because it shapes everything that follows. Every decision on this page was made by a small team choosing carefully what to spend itself on.
The first plan was a large mobile RPG with proper graphics. The kind of game that could sit next to a title from a studio abroad without embarrassing us. We weren't casual about it either. We spent a long time learning the tools, the pipelines and the design side of it.
We kept learning. We kept hitting the same wall.
A game that size needs a full art team and years of uninterrupted runway. We could see what it would take, we could see what we had, and the two didn't meet. Carrying on regardless would have burned several more years and produced nothing anyone could play.
So we called it early. That's the decision we're proudest of, because everything that exists today exists because we made it.
Rather than push on, we sat down and asked ourselves one question:
“What can we actually finish, and still be proud of?”
The answer reshaped the studio. Smaller games. A good idea instead of expensive art. Built for the phones people already carry. And built so that the second game, and the second culture, cost a fraction of the first.
Most games are made for everyone, which in practice means made for nowhere in particular. One idea of what a player laughs at. That isn't how any of us actually live, and it isn't even true inside one country: the jokes in one city aren't the jokes in the next, and neither are the ones two neighbourhoods over.
So we drew a line. We don't make generic games. We make them for one culture at a time, starting with the one we know best, and then we work with people who know the next one. That's the whole difference between a game that feels familiar and one that feels imported.
Build for a culture, not a market. Then do the next one properly too.
Karibu Play is out. It's the first thing we've made this way, and it won't be the last: more games, and the same games made again for cultures that aren't ours.