Finding Father has been nominated for the African Indie Game Award at The Indie Game Awards, and for a small two week game jam project built purely for fun, this recognition feels incredibly meaningful. It celebrates not only the game itself but also the spirit in which it was made. A collaboration built on enthusiasm, curiosity and the joy of trying something new. Before the awards stream on 18 December, we wanted to share the story behind how this game came to life.
Making a game that puts sound at the very centre of the mechanic is not something most studios get to do. Music and Sound often only arrive once the world is built, once characters move, once the story exists. But Finding Father flipped that completely. The question became: what happens when you build a game around sound first. When the mechanic, the narrative and the emotional heartbeat all begin with what you hear.
Last year, James Matthes, Pressure Cooker Studios CEO, and Studio Bo’s Richard Bolland were talking about how Pressure Cooker Studios (PCS) can feel inaccessible to local game dev teams. Richard said what many devs were maybe thinking, “I wouldn’t contact you guys about doing my tiny little game. You’re working on the most wish-listed game on Steam!” It was honest feedback, and exactly the kind of thing that made both sides want to change that perception.
The answer turned out to be collaboration in its simplest form. A game jam. A game jam is an event where participants try to make a video game from scratch, usually in a short burst of time. So Richard and James decided to have fun and collaborate on a game jam, making something playful and low stakes.
Richard remembers their early conversations. “I met James at a Makers Massive Meet Up I think, or maybe CTIAF. Honestly, I have a terrible memory. But going to Gamescom with him in 2024 was a great way to get to know him better. We’re friends now and that’s all that matters.” When asked what led him to suggest working together, he says, “I told James he should get into making small indie games himself by hiring a developer at PCS. But we decided it’d be good to do a game jam first so he could see the process. That’s how Finding Father started.”
Studio Bo pitched several sound focused concepts and together the teams chose the one that felt the most unusual. A hidden object game where the hidden objects are sounds. “We wanted to make a Hidden Object Game but instead of objects, it’s sounds. It’s that simple,” Richard says. To anchor the game in something recognisable, they set it in Cape Town’s Greenmarket Square. Everyday city sounds became clues. The cry of a hadeda. A champagne bottle popping. An ice cream truck echoing down the square. To tie it together, they added a narrative about finding your late father’s MP3 player and retracing his steps through the sounds he captured.
What made the project so creatively energising was the workflow itself. “We’ve never worked on a game that puts sound at the forefront of the mechanics,” Richard explains. “We mixed it up by sometimes finding the sound first and then making the visuals, and then the other way around.” It was a true jam rather than a traditional production pipeline, and both studios leaned into that freedom.
For PCS, the fun was the point. It was a chance to collaborate without the pressure of a large scale project, and to show that the studio genuinely wants to be accessible to local developers. Working with sound as the foundation instead of the finishing layer allowed the team to explore new territory, experiment quickly and enjoy the process.
Even though Finding Father wasn’t built to be a breakout hit, it uncovered something fresh. A hidden sound game is not something the teams had seen done in a popular format before, and the project carved out an unconventional space where sound truly leads.
Now the game has been nominated for the African Indie Game Award. For a two week jam that began out of curiosity and friendship, this recognition feels like a perfect celebration of what can happen when two teams come together simply to create.
You can play Finding Father here.
On 18 December, when the Indie Game Awards stream live, we’ll be rooting not just for the game, but for the collaborative spirit that made it possible.