App launch puts Faith Lutheran grad on tech world’s map

As a child growing up in Summerlin, Ishmael King couldn't get enough of board games. Now 19 and a college sophomore at the University of Toronto, he recently launched an app for the game he invented, called King of 20.

In elementary school, he enjoyed playing Chutes and Ladders, Uno and checkers. In middle school, it was Scrabble and Apples to Apples. The trend continued into high school.

"I spent almost all my board game playing time playing against my mother," King said. "Most days after school, she and I would spend one to two hours playing Scrabble or Risk. I would almost always lose, but it was fun nonetheless."

He showed particular interest in the creative and technical aspects of game design. One day, when he was 16, his mother, Pauline Miller, challenged him to invent a board game based on math. They had both noticed most math games were so focused on building math skills that they left out the fun. King of 20 was born.

The games ask players to use numbers and operations to make expressions on a matrix of square spaces. The goal of the game is to make expressions that are as close to the number 20 as possible. One's score is determined by the difference between the expression's solution and the number 20. The lowest score wins.

The game got its introduction in Las Vegas at the GAMA Trade Show in 2012. GAMA, the Game Manufacturers Association, is a nonprofit trade organization for manufacturers.

The following year, King of 20 won a Tillywig Brain Child Award, and King was also nominated in the Young Inventor category of the sixth annual TAGIE Awards, which celebrate inventors, designers and authors of toys and games as part of Chicago Toy & Game Week.

Erik Ball was one of his teachers at Faith Lutheran Middle School and High School, 2015 S. Hualpai Way.

"It was very exciting to hear that Ishmael took his love of puzzles and skill sets in mathematics and statistics and turned it into a game application," Ball said. "It's not surprising that he did. He is a very motivated, hard-working young man. But what makes me the most proud of his venture is the fact that he chose to put all of his talents into a game that others may enjoy. That's classic Ishmael — doing something positive to benefit others."

With those accolades, King set out in this year to make the game into an app and relaunch it.

"Since 2012, when the King of 20 board game was first conceived, I thought it would translate well into an app," he said.

Trouble was, that requires the ability to write code, something he had no idea how to do. Hiring an app developer was expensive. He learned it could cost $30,000 or more.

So King set out to do it himself. He took a class at the University of Toronto to learn how to write code. He used his summer break, working around his summer job and volunteering, to complete that task, devoting three to four hours daily to work on it.

"When I first began development in June 2015," said King, "the task seemed extremely daunting. I had very little guidance and was not sure I would be able to produce a polished product. But I continued developing because I found the process interesting. ...The hardest part was getting myself to start. On the first day of development, I was scared of making mistakes that would jeopardize the development down the road. Development was slow at first, and I second-guessed myself often, but as the game took shape, I became more relaxed."

There were some tweaks and some other challenges, but in the end, he did everything himself. Friends and family tested the app for him.

King received word just before Labor Day that it had been accepted.

It was ready to be reviewed by Apple. Aside from having a Mac computer, developing the app cost King less than $250.

King of 20 can now be found in the App Store. How did it feel to be accepted?

"We were ecstatic," King said. "We had heard rumors that it was very difficult to have an app approved on the iStore, so it showed us that our app had some quality to it."

Visit kingof20.com.

— To reach Summerlin Area View reporter Jan Hogan, email jhogan@viewnews.com or call 702-387-2949.