A 16-year-old indie mobile game developer from South Africa, Brandon Kynoch, recently left many people awed when Apple featured his game on its popular App Store.

Brandon is a self-taught developer and built his game, called Torus, to improve his skills and for fun. He started engaging in game development, graphic design, and programming at eleven years old.

Since then, he has been teaching himself nearly everything by searching for information on the Internet and using various computer science books bought online. He has taught himself C#, Java, and other technologies.

What the game Torus is about

Torus is an enjoyable, quick-paced, and invigorating mobile action/arcade game that requires a player to tap on dots to join them before advancing to higher levels. If a player misses connecting the dots, they lose.

Although Torus is a very simple game, the thrill and excitement intensifies as the player overcomes the various obstacles.

This has made the game very popular on the Apple App Store, as demonstrated by the high number of 5-star positive reviews it has received since its launch.

Consequently, Apple featured it as the “app of the day”. During its first day on the App Store, Torus recorded nearly 100,000 downloads.

Furthermore, it has scooped the number one position in the Free Action Games category, second position in Free Arcade Games, and the fifth position in All Free Games.

How he developed the idea for the game

Brandon came up with the idea for the game after seeing the launch of his first game, Blast, which took about two years to develop. Thereafter, he decided to focus on creating simpler games, as they were easier to make and showed higher chances of success.

He built Torus in about three weeks, which was a much shorter time than the period required to make a game like Blast. Therefore, he saw it to be more rewarding to release such simple games instead of spending a long time creating complicated ones.

This year, Brandon intends to continue releasing other games similar to Torus.

Wrapping up

For a developer to build a game of this quality, especially if he is completely self-taught and still in High School, is surely against all the odds.

We are used to seeing Apple feature games created by experienced developers from reputable game development companies.

As demonstrated by the breakthrough of Brandon’s Torus game, anyone can develop a game and hit the international audience successfully. All you need is passion and desire to learn.

Mobile games are very popular because they are casual and accessible—you can easily get entrenched in a game anywhere, anytime. For example, you can quickly enjoy playing Torus over a two-minute play session when travelling or waiting in a queue.

If you want to be like Brandon, you can learn how to create games using a project-based learning platform like LiveEdu.

The platform has real game development projects that will equip you will all the skills you need to build enjoyable and refreshing games, which can easily be featured on the app stores.