Legends of Learning + GameSalad + YOU!
adent42
Key Master, Head Chef, Executive Chef, Member, PRO Posts: 3,157
GameSalad & Legends of Learning are coming together to bring educational games to kids all over the world.
Legends of Learning is a marketplace of web based video games that engages students with gamified learning.
Replace Unity & Construct 2 with GameSalad in the following video:
Now GameSalad games can become Legends of Learning games! You just need to build your games for our HTML5 engine and use the sample-legendsoflearning.html file as your game’s index file! (Well there's more to it than that, but we'll send you the details once you get accepted into the program).
Now a word from Brian Dallesasse, who oversees new curriculum and content at Legends of Learning:
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My name is Brian, I oversee new curriculum and new content for Legends of Learning and I’ll be your direct contact.
We are looking to hire independent contractors to design, build and deliver an educational game for one of 236 different Learning Objectives (LO's) in our math sprint. Our Learning Objectives come from the USA Math teaching standards, covering grades 3rd-8th (roughly ages 8-14).
We’ll give you the concepts you need to teach inside your game, and you decide how to make the best game to teach them.
Know how to teach “Adding Fractions” with a side-scroller? Great!
Think you can make an awesome tower defense game to teach “Multiplication by 10”? Go for it!
Games are paid on a revenue share basis, calculated by your game’s playtime relative to total playtime of all games in the sprint or on the platform. To date, we’ve paid out over $4 million to game developers on our platform.
Here's an example of the model:
Guaranteed Payment Periods (First two years of sprint)
- For the first two years on the platform, games are paid on what we call a “Guaranteed Royalty Rate” where only games in the sprint share a pool of dollars allocated directly to this sprint. In this case, across the two years, there are 4 periods with a total payout of $472,000 in each period (~ $1.9 million overall).
- We are currently in the middle of the 2nd period. The 2nd period ends June 30th. Period 3 runs July 1st - Dec. 31st 2020. Period 4 runs Jan. 1st 2021 - June 30th 2021.
- Ex: Game totals 2,000 minutes in one period. There are 400,000 total gameplay minutes in the period.
- The Guaranteed Royalty Rate would be (0.05%)*$472,000.00 = $2,360.
Primary Payment Periods
- After the guaranteed royalty rate periods, games move into payment in our primary royalty rate. Here, games are paid quarterly and are paid based on their playtime relative to all other games on the platform, and the dollar pool is Legends of Learning’s net revenue for that quarter.
- Ex: Game gets played for 1,500 minutes during the quarter. Overall, during the quarter, games are played 1,500,000 minutes. Company’s net revenue is $200,000 during the period.
- The Primary Royalty Rate would be (0.01%)*$200,000 = $2,000.
You will receive more details, including specific contract details, available topics, and how to submit games once you become an approved developer.
I’m happy to provide feedback if you have questions or are stuck, but I really just want a great final product and how you get there is up to you.
Looking forward to seeing your creativity for a math game!
Brian
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Game Examples
They have very high standards, so don’t expect to make it in without bringing your ‘A’ game (in terms of gameplay and visuals). Here are some examples:
The Fractions Space Tournament (3.NF.A.1 / Understand Fractions as Part of a Whole)
Math Garden: Fluently Multiply and Divide (3.OA.C.7 / Fluently Multiply and Divide within 100)
I encourage you to create a free teacher account on the Legends of Learning platform and explore some of the top-rated games across the math topics!
Application Flow
For their current sprint, Legend of Learning is soliciting Math games. The application flow is as follows:
- Submit an application and samples to Legends of Learning via this form. You are competing against pro developers and game studios, so submit your best work!
- Once you become an approved developer, you will gain access to the Legends of Learning developer forum. Brian will send further administrative details to get you settled. He will send you a list of available learning objectives to choose from, and you will receive a concept document for the learning objective (LO) awarded to you. It is on a first come, first serve model.
- If you are approved as a developer for this sprint, you will also get a contract. Get that signed and returned to them ASAP!
- Make games, submit them, get approved, make money!
We've been cooking this up since the beginning of the year
Comments
Wow. Just took a look as some of the games these poor kids are playing. I am glad I am not a student. Also most of them seem to be unity, I would hate to see how those perform on those crappy Chromebook my son got from school. I guess for the sake of making sure this program is a success, I'll throw myself into the task. Time to fire up my Chrome desktop (now where did I put that USB key).
I have a random question. I know somebody who might be intereseted in making these games. Is there a special version of GameSalad at discounted price that only exports to HTML and is tied to this partnership?
@adriangomez, the Basic version of Gamesalad exports to HTML5 and the Arcade.
http://jamie-cross.net/posts/ ✮ Udemy: Introduction to Mobile Games Development ✮ Learn Mobile Game Development in One Day Using Gamesalad ✮ My Patreon Page
@jamie_c good to know. I didn't realize that. i'll let them know.
@adriangomez so you'll need PRO to submit to this program, but yah, you can use basic to test out browser performance by using arcade and switch to PRO when you're ready.
You'll also need PRO to test the integration features, so you can't get away with basic only. There's not discount because as a creator, you'll be making money from this :)
If they are willing to work with the limitations of the web creator (slower on no internet connection, some bugs), then I guess they could get the Home Edu license. In this case it works to their advantage, because they'll always be developing on the same engine that they'll eventually publish to.
They will, of course, need to upgrade to PRO when they're done, but that's another option.
Finally, I would note that people shouldn't go making games before you get accepted into the program (or at least not games specifically targeting LoL).
They have particular requirements like the Learning Objective you get contracted for as well as some technical requirements.
@jamie_c Basic only does Arcade, not HTML5.
The Primary Royalty Rate would be (0.01%)*$200,000 = $2,000.
I'm guessing this is 1% of $200,000, as .01% would technically be $20. Sorry the math teacher in me had to comment.
I always wanted to develop educational games. I guess I'll apply after some research.
Check out my games on the App Store!
Wordgraphy / Polycolor / 20 Seconds / Minimal Maze
Really? I thought it did HTML 5 as well, my mistake.
http://jamie-cross.net/posts/ ✮ Udemy: Introduction to Mobile Games Development ✮ Learn Mobile Game Development in One Day Using Gamesalad ✮ My Patreon Page
If you're on the fence about this opportunity and have questions, let me know! I can also talk you through the technical side of the integration if anyone is curious.
Not so much on the fence as this being a distruptive time and actual "classroom" needs needing to come first right now. It does seem a bit opaque regarding how it works, though. You are expected to be assigned a learning objective, then make games baed on that? Or can you take existing games and slot them into existing subjects/topics if they're up to the required standard? Also, is there any stat gathering available? If a kid plays a thousand questions on a particular game, can that be recorded somewhere or is it simply tracking minutes played? Just curious how much educators can extrapolate from the time spent playing.
Contact me for custom work - Expert GS developer with 15 years of GS experience - Skype: armelline.support
@Armelline To answer your questions:
1) You will be assigned a learning objective and base the game on that.
2) There are stats gathering, we have repurposed existing behaviors to handle that. Stats include:
If I get approved, I will make sure to create some videos on how to do it. It does not look very complicated from the example.
Looking at the video and some bits from memory, I think you may be able to choose learning objectives from a given set. But as the games fullfill learning objectives, some options may no longer be available to developers.
hi I was lucky to be accepted on the Legend of learning
there are requirement where the game has to talk to their Server LoL
for example "LoL will show its own splash screen while your game is loading. Once your game loads it must call the Init function so LoL knows it can remove the splash screen and show your game."
and other steps like this process
is there any instructions on how we can do that ?
@mshuraih super easy stuff. I got accepted also. I'll show you once I get started, but basically all you have to do is make a javascript call on the file that gets pumped out by GameSalad html export.
Here's the basic integration guide:
https://help.gamesalad.com/knowledge-base/creating-games-for-legends-of-learning/
If you have questions, feel free to ask! Brian has been asking about developers, so we'd like to do whatever we can to help get people into the program!
I'd like to stress that there are established indie game studios in this program as well as individual developers, meaning that they make some pretty good revenue to keep coming back every year!
So put your best portfolio together and seriously consider this opportunity!
I started my game. It is working great so far on my ancient Chromebook. I have two little areas so far.
Very cool concept. Really love it. Unfortunately it's a TON of work for likely very little revenue. Be curious to hear about other developers experience with it tho.
I am an educator and have been making simple learning activities and putting them on Teachers Pay Teachers for free over the last few years. I may be able to give you some insights when developing these games. Happy to help. No compensation. Feel free to PM me!
Is this partnership still active and updated? LoL documentation says it only supports games made with Unity or Construct and one of their technical requirements for all games is to follow the recently released SDK V5, so I thought it would be worth checking if I still can make games for LoL with GS before signing any contract.
@Baguvix it is. Their video was made before we came into the picture. I'm about 80% sure we used their latest SDK. I haven't actively updated the integration, but having done it once, any fixes needed would be pretty quick.
@adent42 Thanks for clarifying this, I will proceed to sign my contract then. From what I read on the LoL forum there was an update at the end of last year (V5 SDK). The biggest change from V4 is that Save+Load state is now mandatory for all games.
Okay, looking at our integration we don't support loadState or saveState, but the update should be pretty quick.
We'll need to test it some, but I just whipped up support for loadState and saveState via the load and save behaviors.
Bascially:
1) Game loads and calls 'loadState'
2) Save Attribute or Save Table stores info to the object from loadState (or a blank object). Then it calls saveState to push the change to LoL.
3) Load Attribute is assumed to be called after loadState has returned, but does not initiate a loadState call.
This isn't in the binary yet. I just wanted to code if up since it was on my mind, but I need to get on some other stuff, so will be testing and pushing this later in the week.
FYI the save attribute stuff has been pushed to production. When you next generate for HTML5 it will be in there.