MakeGamesWithUs (YC W12) Wants To Turn High School Kids Into iOS Game Developers | Hacker News Reader

MakeGamesWithUs (YC W12) Wants To Turn High School Kids Into iOS Game Developers

techcrunch.com

93 pointsDesaiAshu44 comments

American culture is quick to dismiss the abilities of teenagers. But often, the biggest barrier to, say, teens making video games, is the doubt we've taught them to harbor.

"the developers get 70% and MakeGamesWithUs will take 30%."

That's incredibly generous. When I was making games in high school I'd just be thrilled that anyone was actually playing my games. Good on them for not being greedy.

Western culture is quick to dismiss the abilities of teenagers, mostly because parents perception of kids lack their actual ability by quite some time.

Mostly, however it is because the teenagers have never really had to show responsibility nor have they ever been allowed to really do something real.

I hope we can be a small part of enabling kids to do real things. Personally, the experience of building something that impacted other people's lives (albeit in a small way) at the age of 16 really shaped my outlook on life. We hope to expose more kids to this experience as it will give them a unique sense of fulfillment.

Yep, Teenagers aren't dumb. I'm slightly biased on this matter, being one. But, for example, one of the top developers of PHP at the moment, nikic, is 17.

There's definitely quite a lot that can be done by high-schoolers. I only heard about it second-hand, but UC Santa Cruz ran a 4-week residential program for high-school kids who had never programmed before, to learn programming and then immediately design/implement a videogame while doing so, and came up with some pretty good results: http://www.sokath.com/cosmos2011/doku.php?id=games

Don't forget the qualifier - "the company will take all profits from the game until the cost of hiring artists for the graphics is payed off".

So, what do they offer?

- Tutorials/community? Ubiquitous and free anyway, no value added.

- Analytics? Useless to everyone not doing highly targeted design (read: social games)

- Art? Well, as per the above, the devs pay for it anyway.

- Fit and finish? Now this is actually worth something. But all game devs should develop this skill anyway, and if you're a teenager learning game development, that's a good time to learn.

- Networking libraries? Could be useful.

The overall package might be worth something, but probably not worth having another finger in the revenue/IP pie. I say IP because, what happens if you publish game XYZ with them, independently iterate on the concept, and self-publish XYZ 2? Better to just own your work outright.

MGWU founder here - one more bullet point to add, we promote the games as well. We've found students want to write great games, get great art, and then have people play their games - it is of value to them to have someone offer the whole package and worry about promoting the game. We don't take ownership of the code so the developer is free to reuse and/all their code in a different game as long as its not with our art/title.

Also - analytics have been incredibly useful in spotting steps in tutorials that have been too hard or levels that need to be tweaked or reordered.

Thanks for the feedback! I think you're underestimating the value of some of the things we add to the process such as the work involved to get good art, as well as being the place where they can learn about fit and finish. We want to let developers focus on the coding / game-design while we handle the not so fun parts. Instead of having to worry about the not so fun parts you can spend that time building a second game and make even more money!!

For those who don't have money, we take all the risk out of making a successful game. While the developer in some ways ends up paying for some of the art costs (ignoring the fact that the process of getting the art done itself has cost to it), it is guaranteed he will not lose money on art and promotion, which we see as a big win.

We hope the overall package will be worth it, and we plan to add more and more tools / support to make it worthwhile, potentially features like allowing others to beta test your game and A/B testing logos etc. If you can think of more features that would make a revenue share worthwhile please let us know! We want to build things our developers / potential developers need.

This is the kind of thing I would have loved to do in high school. Alas, it was the early 90's, so I tried to write BBS door games instead.

It's never too late :p

Write another BBS Door game for the iPhone -- instant nostalgia.

We'd gladly skin and publish it! MakeGamesWithUs is also for kids at heart :)

Try Android. It is a much larger platform and much more affordable for teens.

Exactly what we need - more bad iOS games :)

I'm kidding, in all seriousness it would be a great experience for the kids.

Hey! We're pretty proud of Elemental Fury ;) http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/elemental-fury/id532040551?mt...

It turns out that high school and college students make games they want to play, so the quality of games in our pipeline has been quite good so far :)

This is excellent. I'm not convinced that playing games has many benefits for the average teenager, but there's no question in my mind that learning how to build games will have tremendous benefits. A successful iOS game requires expertise in such a tremendous number of areas (typically some combination of programming, AI, music, art, geometry, trigonometry, physics, even calculus) that getting youth involved in building one will be a definite learning experience.

A recent topic of conversation here on HN lately has been the difficulty many young people are having learning math. I think one of math's major obstacles as a teaching subject - and perhaps it's the biggest one - is that much of it can seem totally irrelevant.

But get someone totally committed to building a game and then watch what happens when they realize they need to understand Newtonian mechanics in order to make it work properly: I'm willing to bet that a lot of young people will take up that challenge and master it.

Good luck with your startup and be sure to update HN on your progress!

That's a great point. We've worked hands on with quite a few high school students developing games. You should see the notes they scribble while coding. Even if their game isn't physics based there's usually a good amount of trig and I guarantee it feels like much less of a chore than math homework.

I think this is not a great business model. You are planning to take the distributor portion of revenue but also take the additional risk of making the art. This could maybe be okay by itself but probably not. However, additionally it sounds like you want to bring xblig quality games made by young people to ios. Something like 90% of xblig games make less than $200, on the more competitive ios app store they will probably make less.

You need to change your business model drastically for this to succeed. I don't think you will break even with the current business model, much less make a profit.

Most people's first 4 video games fail spectacularly, the younger they are the more likely this is.

There are some exceptions but I doubt they will cover your mounting losses. I am the only person I have ever heard of whose first video game made it on to Steam, but while my game made it on I think many many games did not. Also I was a grad student in engineering at the time, not a high school student. You are essentially trying to VC video game development but only take 30%. This will not work with a 30% cut, and it won't work anyway unless you become a lot more selective on which games you choose to invest in.

like any other VC, i'm sure they're hoping for a one hit wonder.

going the premium account route might be more feasible. Sell premium tutorials, assets, etc. But you're going to need a huge user base in this case.

We have a game that's currently in review by Apple that hopefully will give a sense of just how good these games can be:) The median for games on the App Store is also a lot higher than $200 - in the thousands of dollars. I think we'll break even fine on plenty of games and by virtue of opening up iOS game development to so many potential talented developers we'll have the opportunity to publish real gems.

Only time will tell whether the model works. I'm curious - what cut would you say we should take?

I'm not sure how much you provide beyond art, also an sdk? It sounds like you are essentially a publisher. Since you are giving a royalty advance in the form of art, software support, handling distribution and possibly marketing. You are then giving devs a royalty rate of 70%.

My understanding is that publishers usually take more than 50% of revenue. I don't know if you should take that much or restructure your payment system, and honestly I don't think being a publisher for tiny xblig like games makes sense.

Noted. Check out http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/elemental-fury/id532042459?mt..., we just released it, is this the type of game you mean when you say xblig like games? It's an honest question I'm not particularly familiar with xblig.

HS students are extremely capable of building amazing stuff.

We run hackathons for HS students every few months and are amazed by the things they do. http://codeday.org/pastevents.php

I met with Ashu & the team a month or so ago and it seems like they're up to something great =]

anyone who creates a dead simple tool to bridge the game dev gap deserves praise

Can I log in or create an account without facebook?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1732411

Not at this time. We only request your email so we don't have permission to post on your behalf. I understand some people are not fond of FB login, but we'd like to use real identities on the site. If it comes up as a common complaint we will add a separate login.

BOOOO

I'd even be willing to login with a linkedin account - but not having facebook myself... boooo

Plus, you're teaching kids to make games. You should teach them that there is digital life OUTSIDE of facebook!

Seriously, kids will be born into a Facebook hegemony unless we do something about it now.

That's unfortunate. I fit in your target audience and I deleted my facebook. A lot of my friends have too, two of which I had already sent the link out to before I realized I couldn't actually log in.

edit: If it comes up as a common complaint we will add a separate login.

I also like to think the fact that the article I linked to had 504 upvotes certifies that this is, in fact, a common complaint.

Fun to see an article pop up on this - it was very interesting talking to you a few months ago about this, Jeremy. Hope its going well.

I can't help but briefly consider the proportion of existing iOS (or Android, for that matter) developers who are high school kids.

question: how are you guys different from GameSalad, or Construct2?

We're not "no programming required" - we teach you how to make real native iOS games using industry standard tools.

We're not very similar to either of the two (although I'm not too familiar with Construct2). While there is some overlap, those are at the core a game engine. We are a game publisher. Our tutorials teach you to use Cocos2d (an open source game engine for iPhone, which is similar to GameSalad but in native ObjC). Our value proposition is also very different, instead of you paying us for tools to build a game, we only make money if the game does well, in which case you also make money!

Wouldn't be making games for Android cheaper? Not having to buy overpriced Apple devices

We've thought about this, Android is definitely a more accessible option for many potential developers. However, currently iOS still has a majority share of mobile revenue and seems to be more in vogue with people who are looking to build games/apps. Down the road we hope to be platform agnostic as there is a huge opportunity in Android, however at this stage we would like to maintain a sharp focus.

I'll be straight, tho i think what you people are doing is awesome, i still think you are just riding the hype. Android game development would bring so much more people since it could be done from Apple, Windows, Linux, etc! First time programmers prolly won't end up selling games since its their first try and its going to prolly suck, the good thing is that they will learn how to think while coding.

Define "overpriced".

1000€ more for comparable PC hardware in terms of technical specifications.

The cheapest Mac laptop is $1,000. The cheapest Mac desktop is $600. So you are saying there are comparable PC's available for free and -400 dollars?

I think it's a historically common consensus that high powered macs are considerably more expensive than their equally powered non-mac alternative.

My historical stance on the matter has been that the money goes to R&D. I have no proof to validate my assertion, though.

And some quick links to compare. I could have taken more time on selecting the links, but this was pretty quick:

http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MD104LL/A

http://www.alienware.com/Landings/laptops.aspx

  > I think it's a historically common consensus that high
  > powered macs are considerably more expensive than their
  > equally powered non-mac alternative.

By consensus you mean misconception? I don't remember Macbook Air "clones" being cheaper by $1000. Some are even more expensive. OTOH, I prefer to use computers, not specs. "Multitouch trackpad" may look the same in specs, but in practice it makes huge difference.

Those aren't the specs I look at or think about. I look more at:

8GB DDR3 1600Mhz RAM

Core i7 3.2Ghz Processor

nVidia 650M

256GB SSD

1920x1080 resolution

My mouse is usually a peripheral.

I would also imagine a clone to cost more than the original anyway, in many cases.

No, I mean that I can buy a PC that beats the top of line Mac products with double the RAM, a newer GPU with more video RAM, better processor, costing 1000€ less.

My Asus laptop costed 1000€ and beats the MacBook Pro 17" in the amount of juice I can extract from the hardware.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=define+overpriced#

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