kinda cool, and no coding needed.
Yeah kids should love it!
I keep playing Mario Bros using my pocket famicom 
Cool, I wish I’d thought of that.
Hey guys, total newbie here, but wanted to say Hi, thanks for the feedback on Pixel Press, let me know if you have any questions, and feel free to checkout some of the discussion over on Reddit today too.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1eosz7/we_created_an_app_that_allows_anyone_to_make/
- Robin
That’s cool. It’s more of a level editor rather than a game editor, but it’s still a really novel idea.
If the guys who made it could make it available as a library that’d be awesome. My game’s level editor needs work, the game is already tile based, and something like this would be kickass.
Hmm, its a clever idea and is very “sticky” - people love tech ideas which interface with low tech things like pencil and paper because it joins things that they see as simple and innocent, like drawing, with things which are seen as complex and less innocent, like computer games.
However, they say themselves that they haven’t got the scanning to work. Scanning a pencil drawing using a phone camera isn’t easy from a tech point of view and the most difficult bits are going to be what do you do if the camera isn’t held straight and if the lighting is bad. Both of these are going to be even more difficult when operated by the kids who are the target market.
Once you’ve got your game level in then you’ll discover that its not much fun to play and you need to edit it, you then discover that its much easier to edit it on the iPad then erasing your pencil lines and moving it, so you end up redesigning the levels on the iPad anyway.
I’ll also be interested to see how they work the publishing aspect of it, traditionally Apple hasn’t been keen on apps that can have variable content as its a possible way of skipping the app store 30%.
Don’t get me wrong, I think this will probably get funded and be successful. I just think it will play out like this:
- People buy it because of the pencil and paper aspect
- Kids spend ages designing their level
- They then spend ages trying to scan it in and find out that they’ve done half of it wrong and other bits won’t scan at all
- They then discover that its easier to edit the levels on screen and give up on the pencil and paper aspect.
This may not matter, because even if the pencil and paper aspect doesn’t pan out the kids are having fun and have found an easy way into game design which may take them to other things.
What would maybe work better is drawing the levels straight onto the screen using a stylus.