17-year-old South African developer releases offline shooter Rogun Army
“I want this game to become a reason people stop scrolling and actually interact with the people around them”
South African developer Lerato Mothata has released Rogun Army, a free local multiplayer party shooter on Google Play designed to be played offline with friends in the same room.
Players host a match on one device and others join locally, and Mothata says it is built for matches of 16 or more players. It can also be played solo. He built the game on his own in Unity and C#, handling gameplay programming, networking, testing and iteration himself.
Mothata said he made the game to solve a problem. He grew up playing Mini Militia - Doodle Army, which let him host matches with friends without an internet connection. As the game received updates, he said, it lost the core qualities that made it special.
By 2025, he realised other teens and young adults felt the same way, and he spent about a year building his own version. “I want this game to become a reason people stop scrolling and actually interact with the people around them,” he said.
Nine years of building
Mothata has been making games for around nine years. He started with Scratch, then moved to Unity at the age of 8 in 2016, and says he has built hundreds of projects since. Rogun Army is not his first Google Play release. He previously published a messaging app and a timer app, though both were unlisted after updates.
His portfolio also includes Half-Bloom, Light In Darkness, TyWar, a typing game, and Blackout, which is in development. He says his father, who played games with him as a child, taught him to “produce more than I consume.”
Mothata hopes to become an indie developer in the long run, but plans to start his career at an established studio. He says he wants a platform to reach more players with Rogun Army.
You can download Rogun Army from the Google Play Store.
