Games from the slowest world

Few weeks ago, when the “One World, a Million Stories” project was confirmed to start from Burkina Faso, we started checking what infrastructure we were going to encounter.

As game developers of the 21st century we immediately checked for internet coverage and speed (here).

To our surprise, Burkina Faso was #196 out of the 196 countries appearing in the list!!!

I remember myself thinking:

“OMG, we are going to the country with the slowest internet connection on the planet!

If we can develop a game there than we can make games anywhere!”

Today we checked the ranking again and Burkina Faso has improved a bit its ranking, Now it’s #194 out of 198 but it’s still among the slowest countries of the world (about 15 times slower than the world average broadband speed of 22.34 Mbps).

Burkina_Net_Index

Apart from the official stats, what really matters is the every day reality. After one week in Burkina Faso we can confirm that the connection is very slow but that’s not our main problem. Anticipation can overcome slowness, but the only weapon against the unreliability of the connection here is patience. 🙂

In one week we already experienced almost one full day unconnected and few electricity blackouts. But reading this it may seems worse than it really is.

Overall we were able to work and we already learned few tricks to overcome the technical limitations. And we always have a secret weapon available in case of need: the 3G mobile network seems more reliable!

Finally, if even the 3G network should fail, then our last resource would be singing “Hakuna Matata” like in the Lion King 🙂

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