Game Publishing for Kids

Bold textSo you want to get rich, because your idea is better ;)

Your Idea

Make sure it is your idea. You can proove this best by making it yourself, out of your own head, in your own room. Inspiration is ok, ideas can not be patented but their unique presentation may well be.

What this means is, whatever you create with your own hands is protected with your copyright automatically. Meaning you get to decide what to do with it: Whom to share it with and how, at what price or just give it to all your friends for free. For example, if you make your own game character out of painted clay, you even get to decide who can make pictures of it.

What this doesn’t mean is to make a copy of something and then say the original is yours. The copy is yours, you made it, but it’s still a copy.

To test the originality of your idea, if your friends say “wow how cool i wish i had thought of that” that is a good indicator of a fresh idea. If they say (and you think the same in private) “oh, this really reminds me of BLABLABLA” or “oh, isn’t this BLABLABLA” you might be in trouble. Usually things fall in the middle, some say “oh this reminds me of BLABLA but i like the blue hair better” while others go “wow, BLABLA is so lame you really took it to another level”, which is the point. Ideas spawn ideas, the more the better. Think of how memes work and you know what i mean.

Your Creation

It doesn’t matter what form your game has. But depending on how many copies you want to make and how fast you want to share it, it will probably be digital. It is good to have clear pictures of how your game looks, you can even make a mockup or a storyboard just with pen and paper. That is called a concept and gets done by the Game Designer, aka you. This then needs to be made playable by the Game Programmer, also you, else it’s not really your own game but a collaboration between you and whoever helps you get it out in the world. Any art, characters, background pictures etc. you are using to bring your idea to live should also be done by you because copyright.

Intellectual Property

Say you programmed your game in Scratch, or Minecraft or whatever. In theory, what you made, you own. So if you can export the game in it’s entirety, as a file or folder, that is best. You could call that the source code. You can then share it with the world and if you can make it work on another machine or from another account, it’s alive and jumping around.

Distribution

Online Repositories

You may want to put your game on f.ex. Github, so whoever wants to play it will have to know what to do, how to install it etc. There you can control who can see and download it (make it private if you just want to share it with your best friends) or just see the statistics about the downloads if you published it for everyone free.

Online Platforms

You can upload your finished game to a platform, like Steam, where your game can then be downloaded for different platforms. This usually costs money and will involve your parents to get some money paid to you. There are also closed corporate platforms like Apple or Android, which means only those that own such a machine can play your game and you share your profit with the company.

Free vs Fee

You might want to think about wether you want many people to play your game and know your name and you trust that fame will make you rich OR you trust nobody and want to see some money first before giving a copy of your hard work that might then be stolen and copied for free. Ask yourself, where you got your own games and how and whom you had to pay for that and how, be it with money or data or both.