Today DEVELOP magazine's front page stories were: ZYNGA falls 18%, Unity CEO Backs Kickstarter of Code Hero a game that teaches game development with a code gun, and Tim Schafer raises $2 million on Kickstarter.
Well I am the founder of Code Hero in the picture, Alex Peake, and our Kickstarter has blown up today hitting BoingBoing, TechCrunch, ThinkGeek and more blogs than I know what to do with.
We've surged since Tim Schafer raised his million in a single day, mostly because it lit a fire under us to push push push every way we didn't know we knew how. Every game dev is talking about the rise of Kickstarter and I wonder how much this could bleed into startups.
We want to prove that a totally unknown indie can pull off a proportionate success to that of a legend like Tim. We're going to hit $100k thanks to our allies who've put aces up our sleeve for the media to roll out every day for the next 7 days. We're grateful if you can help spread the word or have ideas.
I've had twitter storms with projects like http://www.tacticalcorsets.com but this is different: backers are playing it and learning computer programming. It's having an impact.
Schools installed it in classes. People used it as ob interview challenges. We're working on a JobBoss to make this a service.
I was inspired to make Code Hero by YC and PG. I applied in the spring, interviewed, didn't get in. The sleep-when-you-die drive it magnified only got stronger.
Compared to what we're building now with our new team, the current buggy beta is more of a tech demo, but I would love to know what you all think of it.
I live in a Noisebridge hackerspace-adjacent hacker house full of team members and cofounders of mine and from other startups YC and otherwise.
We're compared to Code Academy, which is similar to a feature we were close to releasing at the same time. I was bothered at first by a competitor. I liked their design. But it was crystal clear: Code Hero is not just a web app. We do something that has never been done before for a gamer audience that is 98% of young people. Code Hero turns gamers into coders. Games started 86% of my hacker friends on the coding path. Our metric is programmerization.
Code is the new literacy. We work on the same team promoting that. Anybody who encourages code and science literacy is an ally. Code Hero has a built-in web browser for WYSIWYG editing and API referencing that could feature web-based educational tools in an upcoming version.
I'd love to hear from Code Academy's founders and others in this space who want to talk about our shared cause and the many possible approaches to it.
Most of all I'd like to hear from you what you think of Code Hero as a game. We're aware of 0.192's flaws given that it is still just a prototype compared to what the team is building next, but you can play it and see from our plans on the Kickstarter where we're going with this: Portal-style puzzle learning, Minecraft-style sandbox creativity and Code Hero-style things that have never been done before.
