- Role
- Developer & Product Lead | Mowa Lab Project
- Category
- Game Design
Where Is My Change?
- Mummy's briefing. Her list, the money, and a warning about what is out there.
- The way there. Buy what is on the list while okadas, gutters and hawkers get in the way.
- Going home. The light drops and the street changes.
- The name call. Somebody calls your name. Mummy said don't look back.
- Mummy's patience. Touch money on the road and you turn to yam. Three strikes and Mummy comes to find you.
Overview
Where Is My Change? is a mobile browser game about an errand every Nigerian child knows. Mummy hands you money and a list, with one instruction. Bring back my complete change. You run up a Lagos street buying what is on the list, dodging okadas, gutters and hawkers, then head home as it gets dark and the urban legends Mummy warned you about come out. Each errand is longer and darker than the last, and the game keeps going until Mummy's patience runs out.
Why was it built?
I wanted to test whether a shared childhood memory and Nigerian folklore could carry a game, and whether Nigerian players would recognise themselves in it.
- Exploring play as a format for cultural memory, alongside the interactive essays Mowa Lab publishes.
- Testing the core loop with players before investing in more content.
- Learning what makes people start another run without being asked.
How I built it
The game runs in the browser, so it plays on any phone or desktop. The characters and the street were designed as flat vector illustration, then rigged as cut-out puppets that are animated in code, which keeps the art consistent and easy to change.
- Phaser 4 and TypeScript for the game, with Vite for the build and Cloudflare Pages for hosting.
- A build script that turns the vector art into texture atlases and splits each character into animated parts.
- Sound generated with the Web Audio API, with captions for players who have their sound off.
- Google Analytics events that show how far players get and whether they come back for another run.
What I did
- Developed the game concept from the childhood errand and Nigerian urban legends.
- Designed the loop of errands that get longer and darker as the game goes on.
- Directed the illustration style and the characters of a Lagos street.
- Shaped Mummy's voice in Nigerian English and Pidgin.
- Built the game, its art pipeline and its analytics.
- Ran playtests and adjusted the pace, difficulty and legends from the feedback.
Results
- A playable mobile game at play.mowa.work, now in playtesting.
- Five legends and endless errands, with a sun that sets faster the more time you lose.