British 12-year-old boy develops mobile games, download thousands

What are you doing when you were 12 years old? At this age, British boy Sam Smith is already developing a mobile game. Sam is currently dropping out of school and spent all of his time developing games, and his newly developed game Spacepants has been released for Android and iOS, earning $ 1 per download. A very young age, this is really a hero out of teenager.

Sam lives in southern England, probably starting game development a year ago. Start with a programming language called Small Basic, which is a simplified version of VB, mainly used to develop word games. Sam's father then introduced him to a tool called GameMaker, which is a great tool for programmers. Sam's father himself is a programmer, he taught Sam how to develop the game and read the document.

After creating a simple game design idea, Sam started using a free program called Aseprite to set the image of the main characters in the game, followed by a series of tests that finally set the interface to the simplest Double button mode. When the whole process took two months and most of them were self-developed, Sam's father would give some advice when difficulties were encountered, and then Sam continued to make improvements.

Sam's parents had taken him out of school almost three years ago because Sam did not like going to school and said he was hard-pressed to stay in the classroom and was always sleepy.

According to the British regulations, Sam's parents want to complete several plans, does not require too many complex procedures, the key issue is the need to assure the relevant departments, Sam will provide a complete education. Therefore, the whole family needs to adjust their own life to achieve this goal. In Britain, the way of family education is actually not very common.

To this end Sam found a lot of people to help, there is a tutor to teach him weekly art, mom Sam responsible for the geography, grandmother science, grandfather taught mathematics. Three years have passed, and now Sam mainly develops games to learn. Sam says he can learn something through his family's teachings, but now he can learn a lot by developing games. Sam's father even said that games are the best way for humans to learn something. For example, many entrepreneurs say the game can teach children, many schools will not teach something.

Sam has made some money with Spacepants, which is enough to buy a PlayStation 4 game console. Sam is still surprised to see the fact that so many people like Spacepants. Data show that there are already more than 1,000 users downloaded this application.

Now free games in the mobile market is the main force, such as the Finnish game developer Supercell last year a total revenue of 892 million US dollars, thanks to the two popular games Clash of Clans and Hay Day attracted the ads. Sam chose to pay for it because he wants the player to pay for his game, and so the user does not have to repeatedly spend in-game, which Sam thinks is too complicated. Sam even believes that the way is deceptive, free games as an excuse to attract users, but spending is behind.

For failing to go to school for education, Sam initially said he was not comfortable with it and too few people should do so. But as the game continues to evolve, he finds himself encountering many people and the process is very interesting. He recently used Twitter extensively and talked to other game developers on top of it, where he felt he could meet people who knew his work and loved his work.

In addition, Sam will participate in many offline activities, such as Insomnia, the largest game festival in the United Kingdom. During this event, he has met many famous people in game development field and exchanging many face-to-face questions with them. In addition, based on his own experience, Sam conducted a report on children's learning and innovation at an event in Newcastle.

And Sam already has some ideas for game development, and he thinks GameMaker is the best place to start. And Russell Kay, GameMaker's CTO, said they want to give game developers an opportunity to start their own development quickly, even without any experience in development and design. And they also really want to see young people like Sam using their tools, and kids can learn a lot by developing games like Spacepants.

In the United Kingdom, almost all schools are now open to computer programming courses for children, but not very effective. And Sam's suggestion is that students should really be in front of the computer instead of sitting in the classroom.

Regarding the future, Sam confirmed that he would work on game development for a long time, but he did not rule out the possibility of returning to school. This issue needs time to judge. After Spacepants's success, his next game is already under design, and according to Sam's vision, it should be a robot game.