Nanisca
Sigma Digital · South Africa (remote) · Sept 2025 – Aug 2026
An educational gaming platform built from the ground up for first- and second-grade children in Africa, delivered on low-cost Android tablets.
I joined as Lead Gameplay Programmer, hired the programming team, and led it as technical lead for eleven months — owning the architecture, running code review, and driving sprint planning with a distributed South African team.
Nanisca is a private client project and is not publicly available.
What I Built
UI Framework
Designed the platform's shared UI framework — a grid-based container providing a progress bar, corner buttons, and an animated teacher demo system used by every activity on the platform. Migrating all activities onto this framework was a prerequisite for the architectural work that followed.
MVVM + FSM Architecture
Designed and introduced an MVVM + finite-state-machine architecture adopted across all activities. The pattern decouples game logic from presentation: each activity's rules live in a Model and ViewModel tested in isolation, while FSM states make the activity's flow explicit and auditable. I created the scaffold, wrote the migration playbook, and led the team through migrating every activity onto it.
Six Curriculum-Aligned Mini-Games
Delivered six mini-games mapped to a first- and second-grade reading and writing curriculum, with two rounds of playtesting with the target age group. Each activity shares core mechanics through the framework — curriculum content is swappable without rebuilding the underlying game logic.
Educator Collaboration
Worked directly with educators and instructional designers across time zones to translate curriculum goals into game mechanics — bridging educational theory and interactive design in each sprint.
Tooling & CI
Built a PCK Builder editor plugin for configuring and exporting activity packages at runtime, and improved the CI pipeline for automated linting and test runs on every pull request.