Meet the Temple computer science student who created his own game

It’s not an easy game to beat, trust me

Almost two months ago, rising Temple junior Byron Jenkins was able to create a brand-new iPhone game called Huelo.

http://twitter.com/CodeHerk/status/854155301670596608

The game layout is fairly simple: a small, tri-colored ball rotates in the middle of your screen, and much smaller balls that match one colors of the central ball fly across the screen. The object of the game is to match as many colors as possible.

Byron has created one other app, ShawnWeTrust, in order to help his friend pursue a professional rapping career.

The Tab Temple had the pleasure of speaking with Byron about his app Huelo and the creative process.

What was the inspiration behind this app?

I always wanted to get into the developing, but I didn’t know where to start. Someone at my job was telling me about this Apple scholarship, where they fly you out to the WWDC, where they announce all the new products for the next season.

I was striving to get one of the free plane tickets to go so I worked on the application and I came up with my own idea of the game while I was watching tutorials, and I added my own little twist to it.

Three weeks later, I completed the application! Now I’m trying to build it for Android devices.

Did you always want to be a developer or did you have a different track?

I knew for sure that I wanted to get into Computer Science, I never doubted that since elementary school. I come from a family of boxing, so I grew up boxing.

None of my brothers went to college, but I had to go to college. In elementary school, I had to go beyond the sport of boxing. I didn’t just want to box—I wanted to do more.

In eighth grade, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I debated about doing Accounting, or something with Mathematics because my dad was always good at math.

I was always curious about technology and I questioned the way things worked so that’s the direction that it led to—it was either Computer Science or Computer Engineering, but I was more interested in the software, not the hardware.

How did you come up with idea for this game?

So I thought about the game Brick-no, Breakout. I wanted to add a little twist. Instead of the ball hitting a couple bricks, I’d rather just have one circle, where the circle is just propelled to that big circle. I gave it three colors. So basically it’s a spin off of Breakout and Color Switch. I was trying to add a little twist with the two.

I played it, and I’m not very good. Do you have any advice on how to win?

Don’t try to chase the balls coming toward you, but avoid them and you don’t lose any points for avoiding the balls. You will lose if you mismatch the colors and you can also tap on the circle itself to spin it faster because it spins automatically. I didn’t want to give the users the advantage of rotating the ball because they will get lazy and not move the circle!

You have to tap off the circle to move the circle itself. The black ball, you can’t match that with any color, so instead you just have to avoid it.

You always doubted the importance of mathematics in the real world and how practical they are, how has creating this app changed those ideas for you?

Temple has classes like Calculus 1 and Calculus 2 and even in high school, I never questioned it because there are always questions in the book where a person has some real life applications.

You can ask yourself, ‘When will I apply this sort of math,’ and you can in Computer Science.

For instance, drawing the circle, no matter what device, depending on the size of the device, the radius of the circle will change according to the width and height of the screen.

The touch applications respond to the touches on the screen, so it all matters about math and its all really important. It’s not just the drawing showing the user the circle on the screen, but the performance of the application itself because you have to have a working app! If the app doesn’t work, it won’t be published.

The frustrations I went through, in those three weeks, I almost gave up. However, I took a break and I came right back working on it.

Is this something you did by yourself, or did you have other people helping you with it?

This application was all by myself: the icon, the design, the logo.

I used Illustrator—I watched tutorials on that as well, so within the three weeks, I familiarized myself with Illustrator, and I was just trying to get my feet wet with graphic designing.

No one can do it better than yourself; you can ask someone else, but then you’re going to be relying on someone else. I took the extra step forward and tried to get familiar with graphic design on my own.

How was the creation of your first app different from this one, if at all?

It’s all about the audience, who you want to target. That application for my friend would target his fans, or anyone who is interested in hip-hop and his music. The game itself is targeted for everyone, which is a great audience because who doesn’t want to play a game!

My goal is to make sure all my applications are free. They called that a freemium model when they annoy you with advertisements but that’s how developers make their money. They will annoy you with advertisements until you say, “Hey I’ll give you a dollar to stop giving me all these advertisements.”

What I try to do is to not annoy you with the ads, but you’ll know they’re there and while it’s free for you—I make some sort of income.

Are you making income with Apple, or is that with the advertisements?

I wouldn’t make money through Apple because it’s not a chart tops app. I make the money through Google.

Are you able to see different high scores or stats about how many people are downloading the game?

For high scores, that’s a good mention, because I’m trying to work on an update for it now, where you’ll see other people high scores to compete with your friends, or maybe through Facebook or Game Center on the iPhone, so you can compete with your friends, or check the leaderboard.

I could see who else downloaded it and how many people downloaded it for a particular day.

Do you have any other app ideas, or any specific direction in which you want to go with app design?

I’m letting nature run its course, I’m just going where ever my ideas take me. If I come up with a great idea and it doesn’t exist, if I do enough research on it and I think it’s a good invention, I’ll work on it. But right now, actually a friend of mine and I are trying to get a team together that way we could develop applications for businesses. We want to make applications for, maybe start up companies, or maybe companies that are already established.

You can check out Byron’s app Huelo in the App Store, or at this link.

Byron can be reached on Twitter at @codeherk.

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