Falò is Italian for bonfire. When your studio is named after a fire, sooner or later you make a game about standing next to one with a pair of tongs, pretending you know what you're doing. This is that game.
Yes, I'm Italian. But I live in South Africa, where a braai is basically a religion, and my wife and kids love it as much as anyone. So a braai game was always going to happen. Think of it as nonna's Sunday lunch moved outdoors: more meat, the same strong opinions.
What's in the name
South Africans get all three words at once. For everyone else:
- Fire. The heart of it all. A proper braai means real wood or charcoal, lit well before anyone eats, so everybody can stand around the flames while they burn down to perfect coals. Gas exists too, but that's a debate for later.
- Gees. Afrikaans for "spirit", said with a throaty g, roughly "ghee-ss". It's the energy, the good mood and the togetherness you feel at a lively get-together or in a packed stadium. Not geese.
- Braai. Calling it a barbecue undersells it. It's a ritual: boerewors, chops and chicken over the coals, braaibroodjies, pap and chakalaka on the side, and everyone with an opinion on how it should be done.
Put together, it's the whole experience: lighting the fire, the gees of friends and family, and good food off the coals.
Four weeks, in one list
- Day one. I write down my ideas for a braai game. It's Heritage Day, when half of South Africa lights a braai. By the evening the campaign is a year of braais across South Africa.
- Day two. The shop run, the guests' verdict paddles and the ads.
- Day three. The Chunky Sticker look, 65 portraits through Scenario, the painted backdrops, the sound effects, the first virtual playtests and the iPad layout.
- Day four. The Suno soundtrack goes in. The first TestFlight upload. The Politics Conversation becomes The Big Debate. The game gets an ending.
- Day five. A fourth playtest round, through the ending. A polish pass. A fairer name filter.
- Day six. Saves that survive a crash, and a new grill emblem.
- Two weeks in. My own review from real phones, the ghost finger, weather in the sky, Android prep and the sixth iOS build.
- Day sixteen. Store screenshots and preview videos, and build 7 goes off to App Review.
- Day twenty-five. Apple's first foldable is days from the shops, so the game learns to fold. Two days later build 8 goes to App Review with it.
Born on Braai Day
My notes asked for a portrait iPhone game in Godot, warm modern pixel art, a Laravel backend and rewarded ads only. They also had one rule I never touched: simple controls, complicated situations. As I put it back then, "The player should not need twenty buttons." The fire, the guests and the chaos should make it hard, not the controls.
That first evening the campaign turned into a calendar: one year of braais across South Africa, from a summer holiday on the Durban beachfront to fireworks on Signal Hill on New Year's Eve, each stop teaching just one new thing.
Fifteen buttons
The first braai screen had a heat grid, eight guests, a helper, a dog with a plan, and fifteen buttons. Technically, that's fewer than twenty. My first note that afternoon: "We should ONLY show the available actions. Remember it's a touch interface." The capitals were mine. Soon the same braai had five buttons, and by the next afternoon the first tour stop had two.
Pixel art, briefly
On the third morning I put four looks side by side: Signwriter, Ember Pixel, Sunday Poster and Chunky Sticker. Chunky Sticker won: thick outlines, white sticker borders, sky teal and fire colours. My kids approved it, and in my house that's the only sign-off that counts. So much for the pixel art in my notes.
Then the same Braai Master, Naledi, went to three image engines with the same prompt. I asked all three for a chunky sticker. PixelLab sent pixels anyway, because pixels are all it makes. GPT Image 2, through Scenario, won, earrings and all. By that evening the game had 65 portraits, 17 painted backdrops and 65 sticker icons. The same day the iPhone game became an iPad game too. My reason, in full: "Kids play a lot on iPads."
The wors has to look like wors
A braai logo without boerewors is just a fire. My note on the logo said it "definitely need[s] a boerewors which is basically essential in South Africa", so a wors coil became the hero of the logo, the emblem and the app icon. The icon is two of the cast, Naledi and Oom Pieter, two generations at one braai, holding up a grilled wors on the tongs.
Along the way I asked for the wors to look less weird. It took a few tries. A coiled sausage on a stick is harder to draw than it sounds, and I'm saying that as someone who can't draw at all.
Sixteen testers who don't exist
I don't have a test team in South Africa, so I made one. The game got a turn-based playtest harness: the clock freezes between moves, and an AI tester sees only a screenshot, then says where to tap. Each tester was a persona with a name, a home town and plenty of opinions, and none of them ever saw the code. Four rounds, sixteen testers, twenty-one reports.
They were blunt. Johan from Centurion looked at my wood fire and wrote: "Charcoal is for people in a hurry, and briquettes are for tourists." Now a wood fire starts in flames, and the skill is waiting for white coals. Chantal from Mitchells Plain found my Cape Town a bit touristy, so Tweede Nuwe Jaar on the Cape Flats became a special event, next to a Diwali braai in Chatsworth and an Eid braai in the Bo-Kaap. Tannie Marietjie, 67, from Bloemfontein, would play on Sunday afternoons "if the buttons stop multiplying". So a tap now flips, and each tour stop brings just one new tool.
Marco, 44, an Italian newcomer in Joburg, read the title and wondered: "'Gees'? No idea. Maybe the geese?" As an Italian myself, I felt seen, which is why this story comes with a dictionary. And the line the testers kept quoting came from a guest's verdict paddle: "Best braai of my life. Don't tell my dad." Liam, 15, who skipped the tutorial: "Hahaha ok that's actually funny."
Virtual testers are honest, tireless and never steal the wors. They aren't real players, though. That test was still to come.
The weekend it got real
On the third evening came the backend, in Laravel, which I use every day anyway: the Daily Challenge, weekly province leaderboards, friend codes, a sponsor form, an admin panel, and even a referee that can replay the top runs in Godot to check nobody cheated. My notes said pixel art and Laravel. Laravel made it.
On the fourth day the first build went up to TestFlight. Then I played it on my own iPhone for the first time, and wrote my first real review: get rid of the Godot screen at the start, the bottom buttons are hiding behind the home bar, and the sponsor form shouldn't just open my Mail app. Fair points, me. My first shared score went to the one contact guaranteed to be impressed: myself, on WhatsApp.
Lekker sounds
There are 40 sound effects, and each one was picked by ear from three candidates: a natural one and a playful one from ElevenLabs, and one built from code. The music came from Suno, with Claude Cowork driving it for me: a calm loop and a groove loop in six South African styles (maskandi, boeremusiek, kwela, goema, amapiano and marimba), plus a title theme, a road-trip theme for the map and a results jingle. There's a sound for a hadeda alarm, one for load shedding and one for a monkey raid. A rugby try gets a generic crowd roar, and nobody gets real commentary.
A table of critics
On the evening of day four, the game got an ending. After New Year's Eve comes a bonus stop on 1 January: the Braai Masters' Invitational, where eight Braai Masters sit at your table as critics. Clear it and you get the Year in Review: your route across the map, a group photo of everyone you cooked for, the credits, and a Braai Legend card. The credits are one line, "Created by Falo Games". The playtesters noticed. Fair. That's the whole team.
Own tongs, own spot
A braai is a celebration of meat, but not everyone at one eats it, and I didn't want them handed a lonely mielie and a sad smile. So the vegans and vegetarians get proper food: plant-based wors, veg sosaties, portobello mushrooms and halloumi. The rules are the real ones too. A vegan's food goes in its own basket and gets its own green tongs, because tongs that touched a chop count. Get it wrong and the guest's card tells you why, "touched pork", "has meat" or "not vegan: dairy", and they politely wait. Get it right and you hear: "Own tongs, own spot, cooked right. Thank you." Do it often enough and the Year in Review crowns you Vegan Whisperer.
Off the menu
Some things never made it to the braai. My notes had a Politics Conversation event. I dropped it: in South Africa, politics is too divisive to joke about. Now it's The Big Debate: "Gas or charcoal? Someone has started The Big Debate. Loudly." Everyone has an opinion on that one too, but nobody leaves the braai over it.
There's no alcohol either. The drinks are on ice, and that's all we'll say. Regional banter is about places, never the people from them. And the player name filter learned its job quickly: the first version, which lived for about half an hour, was so keen it blocked Ishita, Harshit and Kshitij, three perfectly good names, because of four letters hiding inside them. The fixed one lets through all 86 common South African names it was checked against.
The last ten per cent
After five days the game was close, but not finished. What was left was hardening: saves that survive a crash, a braai that pauses itself when you leave the app, and testing on real phones.
Real phones found what no virtual tester could. Every so often the game stopped listening to my taps. iOS sometimes loses the moment a finger lifts, so Godot thinks that finger is still down and ignores every tap after it. The fix is a small guard that spots the ghost finger, lifts it, and replays your tap. I also noticed rain falling on the braai under a perfectly sunny sky, which my own notes had already warned me about: "WEATHER FORECAST: Incorrect." Now storm clouds gather before a storm and the wind moves the trees. I asked for landscape layouts too, then talked myself out of it. It's portrait only, on every device. Well, nearly every device.
The last fight was with my own computer. The App Store wants a 6.9-inch iPhone screenshot 2,868 pixels tall, and Windows won't let a normal window be taller than the desktop. So the screenshot tool now opens a window with no frame at all, and Windows doesn't argue with that.
A phone that folds
Build 7 was waiting for review when Apple's first foldable, the iPhone Duo, came within a week of the shops. It has a 5.4-inch screen on the outside and a 7.6-inch one inside, and on the simulator my game looked lost on both. Folded, the game sat pushed to one side. Open and held sideways, iOS squeezed my portrait-only game into a narrow strip between two black bars.
So the Duo became the one exception to portrait only. Open it sideways and every screen splits at the fold: the grill on one side and the guests on the other, and on the menus a big picture in one half and the buttons in the other. A check now walks through every screen and fails if anything you can tap sits on the fold. Folded, the game fills the screen right up to the camera strip, with a wooden fence post drawn behind it and the bunting tied to the top.
The Duo also got a trick no other phone can do. On a kettle braai, fold the phone shut and the lid comes down. Open it and the lid goes up. That took a Sunday, and two days later build 8 went off to App Review.
By the numbers
- 13 tour stops, the Invitational and 3 special events.
- 14 Braai Masters, 7 helpers, 65 portraits and 17 backdrops.
- 40 sound effects, each picked by ear from three candidates.
- 15 music tracks in 6 South African styles, from maskandi to amapiano.
- 3 bots, sharp, relaxed and sloppy, that play every stop.
- 4 playtest rounds, 16 virtual testers and 21 reports.
- 8 iOS builds, and the eighth, with the iPhone Duo, went to App Review.
- 0 alcohol, 0 politics, and 1 dog that regrets nothing.
What I learned
- One tap should do one thing. Tannie Marietjie was right.
- When a South African tells you how to make a fire, write it down.
- Don't ask a pixel-art engine for stickers. It will smile and send pixels.
- Test your name filter on real names before it meets real people.
- If it rains on the braai, the sky needs to know.
- Your screenshot can be taller than your desktop.
- "Just now" is not a deadline. In South Africa it means later. Maybe.
Is the wors ready?
In the game, little Tumi keeps asking. "IS THE WORS READY? Tumi would like to know. Tumi will continue to like to know." It is, Tumi. Bring a plate.
