Edugameshub interviewed Ian Steiner, and his dad, Tom, about Ian’s game Meteor Kids, and asked why and how a nine-year-old schoolboy decided to build his own app. You can also see Ian introduce his app here.
Hello Ian. I enjoyed playing Meteor Kids. Why did you decide to make a game, and why did you choose rockets and meteors?
I love space, rockets and meteors so I wanted to make a game about saving earth from falling rocks and meteors. Apart from that, moving circles around was not hard because I did it during the Khan Academy programming course.
Ian Steiner, Developer of Meteor Kids
You began making your game using Processing. Can you tell us a bit about Processing and why it’s good for making games?
The online course on Khanacademy.org is a great starting point as everything is explained with the help of interactive videos made for kids. There is not a lot of reading required. One of the great things with this course and Processing JS is that drawing objects is very easy. I fact you start out by moving objects on screen within minutes. There are a lot of sample games online where you can get ideas and see how it is done. It is a very easy to learn language but still powerful.
Screen from Meteor Kids
After that, you and your dad made an iPhone app. Congratulations! I’ve been trying to learn Objective-C and it’s really hard. What tips would you give to new developers who are trying to learn how to make an iPhone app?
So after I finished the first version in ProcessingJS and the game artwork my dad got ourselves some iOS books from RayWenderlich.com (iOS Games by Tutorial), signed up for the Lynda.com Objective-C Essential Training course and we dug in. Things that were very easy to do in ProcessingJS were much more complicated in Objective-C. The problem with iOS development is that the is a lot of things going on around the core task you are going to accomplish (making menus; setting up Game Center etc.). For my next project I will go back to ProcessingJS again or maybe look into game engines that help you creating iOS games.
How did you and your dad split the work between you, and who wrote the rude messages that appear when you lose the game (my favorite was – “my sister could do better than that!”)?
After finishing the programming course I came up with the idea and did a first version of Meteor Kids in ProcessingJS all by myself. When I was finished, I was not satisfied and wanted an iPhone version. My father told me to draw the game design first, which I did all alone on an iPad using Sketchbook Pro. At this point I needed help from my father as dealing with XCODE [Apple's developer environment for IOS apps] and everything that comes with it on my own was still a bit too hard. My dad, who had no experience in programming himself, helped me to translate the code from JS to Objective C.
[Comment from Thomas, Ian's dad: Ian's passion and interest kept us going because I swear I would have given up without his enthusiasm. I called him the "project manager from hell" as he was bugging me constantly to help him push the game along and finish it.]
As for the messages most of them are by me and my school mates (except for the Star Wars references, they are dad’s). After the first release of Meteor Kids we realized that a lot of people did not make it past 100 meteors. They did not try hard enough!
Meteor Kids on YouTube
Are you going to make another app? And will you continue coding?
Yes! I am still working on improvements for Meteor Kids and want want to make more levels. After that I already have an idea about a next game. It will involve sharks….
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