

Why play when you can code? MakeGamesWithUs helps the new generation make games - jvrossb
http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/26/why-play-when-you-can-code-makegameswithus-breeds-next-generation-of-gaming-prodigies/

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evo_9
Link to game making website: <http://www.makegameswith.us/>

Unfortunately it's Facebook login only to sign-up and use this currently.

Does anyone from makegameswith.us know if they'll be changing this anytime
soon?

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jvrossb
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.

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ekianjo
Are you also going to support Android in the future, or even desktop gaming ?
Not everyone is interested in iOS. :)

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jvrossb
Desktop gaming I don't know. Android yes.

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ekianjo
Good to know. I assume you may be interested to do tie-ins in the future with
the other YC-funded company, Humble Bundle :)

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Munksgaard
Slightly off topic, but the title intrigued me.

I love coding. For me, there is nothing more satisfying than sitting down with
a project, identifying problems and trying to solve them, and emerging
victorious some time later. It can be something as small as writing a parser
for a fictive language (with the hopes of writing a compiler eventually): The
rush when I can finally run "parse sampleProgram.prog" and I get the desired
AST is amazing.

However, coding is something that takes considerable time, not to mention the
large amounts of mental energy needed to work on even small projects, and
sometimes I simply don't feel like I would be able to complete anything of
significance. How many times haven't I sat in front of my computer at 10pm,
knowing that I should head to bed in an hour or two, with plenty of coding
projects I want to work on, but knowing that starting probably wouldn't lead
very far, simply because of the investment of time and energy needed to
produce anything.

Those are the times where I resort to games, movies, TV-shows, books or
similar. Lately I've been trying to focus more on reading books, since they
almost always leave me with a more lasting feeling of satisfaction, but in the
past most of this time has been spent playing games.

I want to get better at coding and I want to work more on some of my projects
(I am notoriously bad at finishing stuff, something else grabs me and I lose
interest, or maybe it's because I get demotivated every time I encounter
something hard), so I wish that I could get more stuff done in those late
hours.

Have others experienced the same, and how have you dealt with it? I realize
that sometimes your brain needs to unwind, but I feel like I'm not getting
enough out of my evenings. Does anyone have any suggestions for cool
programming projects or exercises that could be worked on when you're a little
bit tired at the end of the day? How do you motivate yourself to work on those
little pet projects when all you want is to kick back and watch a silly movie?

~~~
colkassad
gagege, you have been hellbanned. When you post comments, very few people can
read them. I checked your comment history and my guess is it was the "thank
you, captain obvious" comment that got you hellbanned.

Sorry to be offtopic, I just hate to see people wasting their time here when
their reason for being hellbanned is a bit dubious (there was only that one
bad comment that I saw). It makes me paranoid; perhaps I am just talking to
myself!

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jiggy2011
I suggest a system where users like us with "showdead" enabled can flag
accounts that we think were hellbanned unnecessarily.

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krapp
How is hellbanning supposed to be better than, say, a mod telling someone off
or banning them and giving a reason for the ban? Assuming hellbanned users are
actual spammers, they're still generating spam. Assuming they're not,
legitimate and potentially interesting content is being stifled.

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jiggy2011
A lot of them are just idiots who post stupid stuff. Hellbanning stops them
from creating new accounts.

Of course there are still plenty of them who seem like decent users who got
off on the wrong foot.

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krapp
Killfiles probably wouldn't solve that specific problem But I think they might
be more equitable. Maybe if users could spend karma to upvote them out of a
hellban?

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gagege
I feel like I'm a responsible user and someone just didn't like one
lighthearted comment I made. It's pretty upsetting actually. It's a shame but,
I guess I'll just not post anymore. Will anyone even see this comment?

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jiggy2011
You appear to be unhellbanned, congrats.

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gagege
I don't mean any offense to MakeGamesWithUs by asking this, you guys seem
cool, but this is an honest question:

Why are developers, especially game developers it seems, so enamored with iOS?
It seems like you'd get a bigger user base and less proprietary-API and
marketplace-acceptance induced headaches if you developed for Android, Windows
or browsers or something.

What is the draw? Is it just the thought that you might make more money on
iOS?

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allsystemsgo
I haven't looked too closely at their tutorials. Last I looked they seemed
pretty simplistic. Do they actually teach you objective-c? I saw maybe 3 or 4
pages of actual teaching, and then saw a link to some example, at that was it
really... Maybe I'm wrong?

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jvrossb
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.

~~~
allsystemsgo
That's cool. I'll take a closer look at it. I appreciate the response. Good
luck with your firm!

