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Entrepreneur Teams With Hostos Students to Start Bronx Video Game Company

By Eddie Small | January 29, 2015 7:44am
 A group of Hostos students and a local entrepreneur are trying to build a video game company in The Bronx.
Bronx Video Game Company
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HUNTS POINT — The next Angry Birds could come from The Bronx if a group of college students and a local entrepreneur have their way.

The budding developers have been working to create a batch of games since late summer, and members hope to use them as a launching pad for creating a video game company based in the borough.

Although the students would eventually like their games to be more complex and intricate, their initial effort consists of five relatively simple mini games — short levels, simple objectives — as they get to know each other better, learn more programming and determine who is dedicated enough to the effort to stick around.

"It was so hard just to make the simple things that that's where we needed to start before we became more creative with our ideas," said Hostos Community College student Jessica Gutierrez, who focuses on coding for the group.

The games could be played on many platforms, including phones, PCs and Macs.

Gutierrez described the classic arcade-style game Circuit Space as her favorite of the five, where players are in control of a spaceship and have to shoot at other ships coming at them.

Circuit Space was mainly developed by Hostos student Dario Oropeza, who specializes in programming and said he was inspired to try making his own video game after getting hooked on Minecraft, an immensely popular game about placing and breaking blocks.

Although he used to play lots of role-playing games when he was younger, he shifted toward indie games made by smaller companies as he grew up and soon started to think he could do this himself.

“I thought I could probably make something similar,” he said. “I don’t know about better. I was thinking maybe I could just make something fun.”

The other four games the Hostos students are working on are Don’t Drop the Apple, where players move a basket along the bottom of the screen to catch apples, Bomb Drop, where players grab toys and drag them to the correct section of the game before they explode, Android Dodger, where players have to move across the bottom of the screen to dodge falling bombs, and Whack A Moé, where players have to poke young female anime characters off of the screen.

The games do not have an end but get more challenging as players get further into them, and the point is to get a high score.

The group hopes to have the games ready for an official launch by the early spring.

"We're going to launch it through our own company that we're still figuring out the name for," said David Echevarria, account manager at Mass Ideation, a tech company helping the students make the games. "We had a dope name, but it was already taken: The Creative Assembly."

The group plans to market their games by creating a blog and YouTube channel where members will update people on their activities and provide information about how to make games, according to Mass Ideation founder Miguel Sanchez. He is also encouraging members to build up their individual Twitter accounts.

The idea for creating the game stemmed from a meeting between Sanchez and Hostos student Brunilda DeJesus during The Knowledge House, a program that the BXL Business Incubator put on in March that offered weekly classes on subjects like tech and innovation.

Sanchez mentored students interested in mobile apps and entrepreneurship, and he encouraged people to follow up with him if they wanted to know more about his job.

"I had told them, if anybody is interested in learning more about what I do, let's talk," he said.

DeJesus decided to take Sanchez up on his offer and came into Mass Ideation over the summer to get some experience working in the tech industry. She told him her main interest was in design, specifically video game design.

She credits her interest in making video games to the animation in Kingdom Hearts, a role-playing game that features Disney characters.

"I love animation," she said, "and I was just thinking I could do animation for video games."

Her passion resonated with Sanchez, as he and Echevarria had spoken about working on a game before, given how popular the field is with young people curious about the tech industry.

Gutierrez said that she has enjoyed putting the game together so far, despite the occasional frustration.

"It's been lots of fun," she said. "[I've been] screaming a lot at computers, but it's fun."