Unity CEO Backs Kickstarter of Code Hero, a game to teach game development
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.<p>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.<p>TLDR: Try Code Hero and let us know what you think!
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/primerist/code-hero-a-game-that-teaches-you-to-make-games-he<p>We've accelerated steadily every day 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 to prove that a totally unknown indie can pull off a proportionate success to that of a legend like Tim. Now we're on track to hit the $100k mark as we have plenty more allies and aces up our sleeve for the media to roll out every day for the next 7 days. Everyone in the game industry is talking about the end of publishers and I wonder how much this could be becoming true of other startups.<p>I've experienced twitter storms with my previous projects like http://www.tacticalcorsets.com but this is different, because these backers are downloading Code Hero and playing it and learning computer programming and talking to us about it!<p>Schools have started installing it experimented with using it in classes. Some people used it as a job interview challenge and want us to make a JobBoss that will take custom challenges like this.<p>I was inspired to make Code Hero in part by YC and PG. I applied to YC at the beginning of the year, got interviewed, and didn't get accepted. The sleep-when-you-die motivation it instilled in me has been with me ever since. There's a lot I could say about what it took to get here and how buggy the current beta is since compared to what we're building now with our new team it 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.<p>People obviously compare us to Code Academy, and they launched their first service in a form that was very similar to something we were close to releasing at the same time. I remember being depressed for a few days at having a tough competitor who I had to respect for their clean design. But then I felt more clear than I had ever before about what we do: 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.<p>I recommend Code Academy to anybody who wants to do web programming since we haven't added that yet. We're building a video game that's going to turn gamers into coders and we start with the thing that got me and 86% of my hacker friends on the coding path in the first place: making games!<p>Code is the new literacy, and we're all working on the same team by promoting that. I consider anybody who encourages code and science literacy to be an ally. Code Hero has a built-in web browser for doing WYSIWYG editing and API referencing that could feature all kinds of other web-based educational tools in an upcoming version.<p>I'd love to hear from Code Academy's founders and everybody else in this space who wants to talk about our shared cause and the many possible approaches to it.<p>And most of all I'd like to hear from you what you think of Code Hero. 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.<p>Alex Peake
http://www.primerlabs.com