jvrossb

But it is... up front ;)

Yup, we end up taking the hit on art/promotion/other costs. So far the best screening process has been motivation. We haven't yet encountered someone who was motivated enough to finish a game with us and whose game was poor enough we didn't want to publish it. We help with game design and playtesting where needed as well.

The artwork can be used in versions of the game that live on different platforms, we will take a cut of any version that uses our art/music/characters.

Definitely the plan at some point. What kind of terms would you like to see offered?

Well most such games go on to add in-app purchases. If you never did, we certainly wouldn't force you to. In that case there would indeed never be any payment to us.

I understand - what kind of licensing terms would you find acceptable?

Good advice, we're going to try and do the same.

Yup :) In fact almost all turn based multiplayer games that succeed are free.

Good to know! What kind of deal would you like to see offered? Do you need the extra services we provide - art, music, code help, promotion?

The people we work with generally don't have $1000 up front and one of their main draws in publishing with us is that they have no other way of getting art/music. For those who have art already we shift that fixed cost towards promotion. Don't forget that we also offer code-level support to a lot of our devs and do extra stuff for them like optimize their OpenGraph actions. It ends up being a really good deal.

I should also point out that by using the SDK you can make three games in the time it would have taken you to make one. The Ghost template game was built and pushed to the App Store in the span of a few days.

We are working on allowing folks to use it without publishing through us. What kind of pricing model would you like to see?

Here's why you want to use it:

-It's so easy to use a couple high school students build a social game with it that's doing quite well.

-It leads you to build the type of game that has a higher chance of succeeding.

-When you publish with us, we produce all the art and music for your game at no upfront cost to you and promote your game. This is easily a $1000 value. We got Name That Jam! To the top 25 Trivia and Music games in the App Store for 2 weeks :)

Just to confirm you mean the makegameswith.us/sdk page and not the makegameswith.us home page?

The product is so awesome customers can't have it! I bet they sold a lot of Hoppers today...

There's a whole series of them now actually. 6.470 is a web programming competition, 6.570 is an Android App competition, and we (MakeGamesWithUs YCW12) are helping set up 6.670, an iPhone game programming competition. I'll be giving the first lecture to 80 students tomorrow :)

My experience as well. I travel a lot and never had an issue with the TSA.

So it's all the more puzzling it's this bad then?

Shameless plug: makegameswith.us. Drop me a line at jeremy@makegameswith.us if you want help making this happen.

I can confirm the French dub is great, though the dubber cuts the end of his sentences off a couple of times. You may want to specify Mandarin/Cantonese/Other instead of just saying Chinese.

Would adding metronome functionality make sense for this kind of app?

They make their voice heard through upvotes, we notice when the top voted comment every time we turn up on HN is about FB login.

Desktop gaming I don't know. Android yes.

We assume you know some object oriented programming and we do teach you all the Objective-C you need to know to make an iPhone game with Cocos2D. Our last tutorial/project involves making a one-level Angry Birds clone. All of our games (https://app.makegameswith.us/) so far were built by students who learned through our tutorials. Nobody had touched a line of Objective-C before we got to them as far as I know.

They'll only let us rest once there are alternatives to Facebook login but this is a step in the right direction I'm sure :)

Yup, removing the login wall is on the TODO this week. Account creation will be Facebook only for the time being, but you soon won't need an account to browse the site's content.

Set up a profile on Elance.com and bid on some dev projects. It's not a particularly non-traditional mean but I mention it because you say you're competent in web and mobile development.

People tend to post about the constraints involved in building their product e.g. boostrapped single founder, weekend project, used xyz new framework, etc...

What do you think of the game? :)

There are a lot of industries where crowdfunding makes the most sense as a payment mechanism. There are always ads in college dorms for package deals on spring break trips to Florida or ski weekends - they will be so much easier to make happen with crowdfunding.

As the activation energy for getting folks together to do fun stuff gets lowered, I'm excited to see what event planning companies start coming up with. Surely there are new party/travel/event offerings that now make business sense thanks to crowdfunding.

Nothing's wrong with focusing on customer value and quality, but you also have to focus on customer acquisition. You don't have to either make a good product your customers like or do a publicity stunt to attract more customers. You can do both.

It was done in Kobold2D, a version of Cocos2D that's also free.

Shameless plug: if you publish through makegameswith.us, we cover the $99 fee. You do need a Mac though.

I think you're half right. If you opt-out of the online precursors to offline gatherings, then yes you'll be left out of those offline gatherings. That's still separate from whether your friends are the type to take pictures of their food and post to Facebook in the middle of dinner.