Technically, I was inspired by Rails for Zombies (http://railsforzombies.org http://railsforzombies.org) as I had been learning Rails for my new job, and had th

Technically, I was inspired by Rails for Zombies (http://railsforzombies.org http://railsforzombies.org) as I had been learning Rails for my new job, and had that fresh in my mind when my bosses said "come up with a new idea". For me, the inspiration was "how COOL would it have been if the interactive console in Rails for Zombies actually made the zombies do stuff and it was more like a game than learning to code!!" After some discussion, the choice was made to switch from zombies to robots because a) "programming" a robot made more sense than programming a zombie and b) robots seemed more "gender/age neutral" than zombies that have a more limited appeal. It wasn't until much later on that we started doing market analysis that we found LightBot. To me, LightBot was a confirmation that there was a market for "games that use programming as a tool", but not something that we were necessarily going to mirror. LightBot is fun, but ramps up quickly and gets pretty in depth into programming concepts pretty quickly. I wanted BotLogic to be a more subtle introduction where the user didn't even realize they were learning how to program along the way. I also wanted players to get comfortable with the idea of "syntax" and "typing code", and I feel the terminal is an important part of the game that LightBot doesn't have (not that it's a bad thing for their game, just that it's definitely something vastly different than going with a purely visual UI).