Makegameswithus is a new iOS game publishing company with a twist: its focus is on helping high school and college students to build games. Makegameswith us will take the kids’ creations, provide professional graphics and art and publish them in the App Store. The kids will own the code, and the company will own the graphics and take a cut of the sales.

Co-founder Ashutosh Desai, creator of the iPhone game Helicopter, says that one thing that’s been missing from the code literacy movement up til now is help in making the jump from knowing some code to actually building something with your knowledge. “There’s a huge number of kids out there with the potential to make games, but they get held up in the process,” Desai explains.

Makegameswithus is trying to bridge that gap by offering tutorials, tools and a forum for developers. The game builders are assumed to already have some object-oriented programming experience, specifically in Java. Desai says the team chose Java because it’s what the AP Computer Science class uses, adnd it’s common in introductory computer sience classes at universities as well.

The tutorials teach programmers to use Objective-C, the programming language for building native OSX and iOS games, for building games. A Mac is required. The lessons begin with downloading and installing Apple’s development environment Xcode and the game development framework Kobold2D. Developers are shown how to build Conway’s Game of Life clone and can work their way up to building an Angry Birds clone. There are other tips and tutorials as well, including an overview of doing version control with Git.

“We wanted to use native Objective-C because we didn’t want to limit the potential of the games kids are developing,” Desai explains “Currently we still feel HTML5 has limitations on mobile devices and HTML5 performance is nowhere near native OpenGL performance.” Desai says that the company may branch out into other languages and platforms, but for now it’s focused entirely on Objective-C and iOS.

Desai says the company has also built its own asynchronous multiplayer framework for building games like Words With Friends without needing any back-end development knowledge. Other tools the company provides include analytics and crash reporting, and Densai says more frameworks and tools are in the works.

Besides training, tools and community what Makegameswithus brings to the table is its team’s experience in packaging and publishing games. Makegameswithus will provide professional art, graphics and music for the games and handle the process of publishing games in the App Store. In exchange, the company will take all profits from the game until the cost of hiring artists for the graphics is payed off, after that the developers get 70% and Makegameswithus will take 30%.

Although the company is focused on high school and college kids, anyone could use the tools and submit games. Desai and the other co-founder, Jeremy Rossmann, are focusing on high school kids because they know that market well – they’re 19 and 20 years told respectively.

Densai says he started making iPhone games in high school and made about $35,000 from Helicopter. He went on to University of California while Rossmann, a long time friend, went to MIT. The two kept working on projects while in college and decided to take a semester or year off to build a game together. But while working on it they thought of a different idea: what if they built a publishing platform for young developers? They pitched the idea to Y Combinator, and after being accepted dropped out of college to focus on Makegameswithus full-time. The duo graduated from the Winter 2012 Y Combinator class.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Program or Be Programmed author, CNN columnist and Frontline documentary director Douglas Rushkoff announced on his blog today that he’s taken a job with Codecademy, a company that offer free online programming courses entirely through a web-based interface. Rushkoff writes that he is joining the company as an evangelist much in the same capacity as Vint Cerf’s role at Google as a “net evangelist.” Rushkoff won’t just be evangelizing Codecademy, but the concept of “code literacy” in general.

Rushkoff was an early chronicler of cyberculture. His first book, Cyberia, is a collection of journalism published in the early 90s. He went on to write other books, such as Media Virus, and direct the Frontline documentaries including Mercants of Cool and digital_nation.

Rushkoff helped kickstart the code literacy movement in 2010 with the publication of Program or be Programmed. Since then, companies like Codecademy, Code Academy, Programr have emerged to spread a greater understanding of programming. There’s now even a children’s book that teaches programming concepts.

Here’s how Rushkoff explained the reasons to promote code literacy in his CNN column on Codecademy in January:

It took a few centuries after the invention of text for regular people to learn how to read and write. The printing press, which democratized print by reducing the cost of manuscripts, certainly helped. Now that we live in a world with newspapers, road signs, package labels and drug inserts, almost no one still questions the idea that teaching kids to read is a good thing, or that basic literacy makes us more likely to create value for ourselves or our employers.

Well, we now live in a world with apps, networks, and stock market trading algorithms that we use, even though desperately few of us understand how they work. And while learning to code may have once been an arduous or expensive process, the college dropouts who developed Codecademy have democratized coding as surely as Gutenberg democratized text. Anyone can go to Codecademy and start learning and creating code through their simple, fun, interactive window, for free.

Interest in Codecademy has been particularly high. The company famously signed up hundreds of thousands of users for its “Code Year” experiment, including of course New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. Just last month Codecademy announced $10 million investment from Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Union Square Ventures Yuri Milner and Richard Branson.

Codecademy hopes to keep offerings its courses for free by charging companies to recruit people who complete its courses. It seems unlikely that large numbers of people who complete the courses will actually be proficient enough to become professional programmers. But as Rushkoff points out companies like Google and Facebook are spending obscene amounts of money on talent acquisitions, so maybe all Codecademy needs to do is find a few undiscovered superstar developers. Hungry Academy is trying a variation on this model by providing paid programming training funded by Living Social. The catch is that those who complete the program agree to work for Living Social for 18 months.

But Rushkoff’s idea of code literacy extends beyond just teaching programming. “I’m not about promoting one website’s solution to the problem of digital literacy as much I am about promoting the culture of knowing the code,” he writes. “This is bigger than just computers. We live in a programmatic world – ‘code literacy’ in business or economics means something different than it does in religion or politics.” Considering that Codecademy recently opened its platform up to developers to build their own tutorials, things could get very interesting there in coming months.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch