How I Left My Computer Science Degree & Developed a Mobile Game

Introduction

2015 was a year that I thought my life was going to change. Like most tech-savvy introverts, high school was a rather terrible experience-- I couldn't wait to move out to the city and start attending a university. The fall of that year I did just that and life seemed pretty great. There were still occasional road bumps including an issue with roommates and housing, but all-around the introductory CS (Computer Science) classes were wonderful. 

I began learning the basics of Data Structures, started to learn Java and C, and even took Calculus & Higher Math courses. However, the curriculum just seemed like it was designed for someone attempting to get hired by a large company. The aim was simply to force you to try every aspect of CS in hopes that it would prepare for what ever random job you would land. My goal in life is to freelance my way to success, so the curriculum and I butted heads a good deal. 

The Tipping Point

Fast-forward to the beginning of 2017, I'm an extremely broke college student who is ready to rip his hair out. The curriculum calls for Chemistry & Chemistry Lab, a Technical Writing course where you write a 40-page report, and second-year English. Can you see the irrelevance perhaps? While the difficulty was reasonable, the sheer fact that a CS student was spending an entire semester completing non-CS courses was sickening. It seemed as though fifty percent of the material learned so far was totally useless towards my dream-- and costing me upwards of $20,000. This is when I made an extremely risky decision: changing my major. 

The Current Dilemma

College is still (at least for the time being) a very powerful tool that gets you into many doors. Personally I still see the value in having a degree in some field, but in the long-run it's more about wealth and achievements. My major was changed to Film & Media, which required less credits and allows me to now access my university's warehouse of media supplies. But, that means I only took two years of CS-related courses. Oh no, is this the end of the technological line?

Not The End Of The Line

An interesting thing about working with computers, is that there is a large secondary market of computer scientists helping other computer scientists make life easy. There are infinite resources, code snippets, and API's that allow literally anyone with a work ethic to learn how to polish a craft in the CS realm. The fact that there are many users of Steemit who have no traditional background in understanding CS concepts proves the point rather well. Many people understand how blockchain works in the practical realm, without having to take a semester long course on the subject.  With that principle in mind, I decided to try my hand a developing a mobile app!

Combining Every Skill

The major idea I learned from developing an app is that being well-rounded in media creation is important, unless you plan on hiring a team. At least fifty percent of the work involved is creatively developing the functionality and generating assets or pieces of the application. 

I have an informal background in Graphic Design, 3d Modeling, and Music Production. All of these skills played a paramount role in creating a quality app, especially in my category of choice: games. My goal was to create a mobile game that involved a cute penguin sliding down a slope. The penguin would have to jump and dodge objects, while being launched from ramps and collecting coins. 

To begin, I used an open-source 3d Modeling software called Blender to develop my character, which I named Pingo. The aesthetic goal was to make the game look low-poly, so difficulty was pretty low in all respects.

Next was deciding how I wanted to program the game, unfortunately at the moment I did not have enough programming knowledge to do anything advanced. The solution was to use a mobile game building engine called Buildbox. This engine provided a GUI that allowed you to build many game styles with user-generated assets. It's very far from perfect, and I have many e-mail threads with the developers helping explain certain functions. If you look online there are also very few tutorials, and the price is rather steep now that the product has traction. 

About a month was spent creating the all of the game assets, arranging them in the editor, and assigning the appropriate values. Learning any program for the first time takes a considerable amount of extra effort, my recent projects are going at a much faster rate. 

After getting the game itself to work properly, the next step was finding/creating sounds for the app. This is where my music production background came in handy. The theme song itself was produced by me, and the sound effects were found on royalty-free audio websites. I used a program called Ableton Live to produce theme song. 

Another major hurdle was getting Advertisements to work inside the application. A few weeks were spent on that aspect alone, but fortunately a solution was found and Pingo Jump was almost ready to hit the app store. 

Publishing The Application

At this point in I'd like to mention that I had been in talks with a few colleagues of mine to properly market the app to our target demographic of people. We harnessed and did our own research to decide that developing strictly for iOS was our best bet. That's ironic because I personally don't own a single Apple device. Everything from this point on was done with the amazing cooperation of my friends and family, I genuinely thank them for their help!

After a few more weeks of trial and error, we got our first version of Pingo Jump published to the App Store. Testing went extremely well and after a few more bug fixes and advertisement adjusting we were ready to push the release.

The "Big" Release

Pingo Jump was ready in all of its glory to grace the highly competitive mobile app market. Currently the application is still less than a month out on its release, but we've pushed around 2,500 users to the game with around a 45% retention rate-- not bad for a simple mobile game! 

What I've Learned

The main value I've gotten so far hasn't been the advertisement revenue, but the data and learning experience obtained from developing a mobile game from scratch. Knowing what I know now, I'm fully prepared to crush the market and develop something ready for virality. 

If you really want to get creative with app development, definitely use more versatile game engines. Buildbox requires no coding, but you are forced to start with templates and exploit GUI features to do anything creative. I am still continuing my CS education at the University of the Internet™, and hope to delve deeper into the world of programming. 

Lastly, a college education isn't entirely necessary to be successful at something. Tailor your actions towards accomplishing your dreams, not what others are doing. The internet is a wonderful and endless plane of knowledge, use it to your advantage because most of it is free. College sometimes wastes your time, and the internet lets you finely tune what information you receive. 

Anything is possible, and life is what you make of it!