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CodeCombat in Y Combinator

• iamkoby 13y ago
  I didn't get it when you where on stage, but seeing your website I have to give you thumbs up. It looks great, it's fun to play (even for me as experienced dev), and overall very promising. Congrats on YC!
  • gsaines 13y ago
    Thanks for the kind words iamkoby, it was a complete rush to be on stage and as Nick's post suggests, it was even more crazy that we got accepted there and then. We can't wait to be a part of the program!
• woud420 13y ago
  That is a pretty cool idea. Actually, my girlfriend has been wanting to learn how to code yet I haven't been able to find something to motivate her. Maybe her love of RPGs and this will get her down on that path.
  • iamshs 13y ago
    Agreed, the visual feedback is so satisfying to watch. I cannot wait to see what they put out after going thorough Y Combinator batch.
  • gsaines 13y ago
    Funny you should mention that woud420, we started this to teach me (gsaines) because I wanted something more engaging than online lessons. But when choosing the artwork, genre, and overall style, we went more cartoony/cutesy because of Nick's wife's gaming preferences. We also made the main character a strong female figure so that girls could associate with story that we're putting together (not currently in the levels). We've got a half dozen new units we'll be adding shortly, and 4 of them are female to sort of balance things out a bit. In short, we're hoping it is something your girlfriend will not just feel comfortable using, but actually enjoy!
    • woud420 13y ago
      I sure hope so too! :) I guess we'll see. Good luck at YC!
• iamshs 13y ago
  Congrats, it is a very nice initiative and a novel idea. I am trying to get back into coding, I do have experience with MATLAB programming (and also VB6 some 10 yrs back), but this website makes it so much easier. I would like to see some UI changes as you progress through your Y Combinator phase, the coding editor sometimes disappears for me, and I don't know how to get it back and have to restart the level and sometimes browser. I am sure the idea will be polished a whole mile now. Also, habit of using keyboard shortcuts sometimes prolongs the coding process. I used Ctrl+S too much, before refraining myself to not use any shortcuts. I like your website and concept very much. Great idea, may you go places. Edit: What languages will I be able to learn through this?
  • gsaines 13y ago
    Hi iamshs, we just noticed that we are getting traffic from HN, pretty wild, we've barely stabilized things and now traffic is picking up again. Yikes. When you say the code editor disappears, do you mean the entire right pane of the player screen? Could you send me a screenshot and any steps to reproduce it at george@codecombat.com? Would love to get that fixed for you. What browser are you using by the way? Although it's technically capable of running on FF, we had a lot of problems on FF and basically told people to just use Chrome after a while. We need to get it working properly on FF, but that's the simplest solution for now. Yes: polish is definitely coming up! I agree with you that the whole "switch between mouse and keyboard" thing is bogus, we need a more complete keyboard shortcut list. The languages we are most interested in teaching are Javascript, Python, and Ruby in that order, but it will be a little while before it's ready for those new languages to be added. In the interim we're just going to be building out content for the JS campaign.
    • iamshs 13y ago
      Sure, I will chronicle the bug next time and send you the screenshot and steps. I am on FF 23 on Win 8. Basically, after the code finishes auto-casting the whole right coding pane disappears. It has happened two times out of maybe 20-25 sessions, and I do not know what triggers it. Awesome. Looking forward to new additions.
• mhamel 13y ago
  And every company after them in Office Hours walked just a little bit slower leaving the stage...
  • reillyse 13y ago
    yes I felt very sad for the rest :(
  • qqg3 13y ago
    Yeah, a bit awkward for those guys
  • gsaines 13y ago
    Yeah, we felt pretty bad about that too. PG wasn't kidding about the surprise, we thought that if we did well we might get an interview, it was a complete shock. We had met the other teams backstage, the founders of both startups impressed us quite a bit and we hope we get to see them in this batch.
    • Finbarr 13y ago
      As one of the founders who was on right after you, I can say that it was awesome to see you guys get in right in front of us. We were a little disappointed that we weren't also called back as we walked off the stage, but after watching a recording of your talk with PG and Sam, I think you guys totally deserved it.
• sillysaurus2 13y ago
  Hi, gamedev here. At one point on stage, you brought up the possibility of open sourcing your code, and Paul cautioned you that you may want to follow game industry conventions. There are two reasons the game industry tends to keep their code closed-source. 1) It has been lucrative for game studios to sell licenses to their closed-source engine. Some game studios, such as Id Software, have made hundreds of millions of dollars (if not $1B) from licensing their engine. This is the main reason game studios tend to keep their source code closed. 2) There is strong institutional bias against releasing source code precisely because nobody else releases source code. If you're not planning on licensing your engine, then I just wanted to reassure you that it's not a bad idea to go open source. You own codecombat.com, and hence you own the pipeline of users. Even if someone uses your code to launch their own version of CodeCombat, it's very unlikely that you'll suffer any problems for it. The only possibility is if your servers go down and theirs don't. But anyone who tries cloning your idea is going to suffer the wrath of the gaming community. E.g. see what happened to "War Z," a videogame that was blatantly ripping off the recent hit "Day Z." The War Z developers were basically tarred and feathered for it. Gamers may be fickle, but they are loud and they are loyal. I can't imagine them defecting to some competitor who steals your code. Beyond code, there's art assets. You could release the code with a permissive license, and release art assets with a restrictive license. Nobody will be able to catch up to you if they have to develop all new art for their clone. I wanted to speak up as a voice from inside the game industry: Don't follow industry conventions out of fear. Their conservatism wasn't derived from experience. Rather, it's because no studio wants to take any risks whatsoever. Let's put it this way. If Notch (the creator of Minecraft) hesitated to follow his instincts, he would've tried to write Minecraft in C++ rather than Java. If, before Minecraft was written, he tried to convince any professional gamedev that using Java was a good idea for writing a multiplayer 3D game engine, everyone would've laughed in his face. And everyone would've been mistaken, as Notch wound up demonstrating. Java turned out to have many unexpected advantages new to the gamedev industry (e.g. the ability to deploy the game through a web browser and the ability to edit code without recompiling the engine). So if you see an advantage in open sourcing your code, go ahead and do it. Don't second guess yourself just because it goes against conventional industry wisdom. The conventions are just groupthink, not pragmatism.
  • 13y ago
• asselinpaul 13y ago
  Was chatting with a someone from CodeCombat on olark. they had no idea it was on HN but the traffic was booming. Ah startups...
  • gsaines 13y ago
    Ha, Nick pointed it out to us about 30 minutes ago, the analytics have been so crazy we've largely stopped watching them for the time being. It's not quite the Techcrunch effect, but the traffic has been through the roof for the past 4 days, HN was sort of lost in the noise. I didn't ask Nick how he figured it out, but I maybe one of the Olarkers mentioned it. :)
    • asselinpaul 13y ago
      yep I was talking to Nick :)
• atldev 13y ago
  So glad you posted this video. I didn't get to see your interview live and had been looking for it. Fantastic job! Imagine the pressure for the next team up :)
  • gsaines 13y ago
    Yeah, it certainly wasn't our intent to up the ante for those coming after us, we spoke with both teams right before on stage, and liked both of them a great deal, smart folks with good ideas.
• xarien 13y ago
  Love the concept, will definitely be interesting to see what you come up with to teach some more abstract lessons. Wish you all the luck. Here's a small big from the couple minutes I spent playing with levels 1 / 2: While it does execute the code on the right perfectly even if it's not the expected optimal entry, the camera focus during a playback will lose sync with the "spells" if you add a few extra calls like moving left and right.
  • gsaines 13y ago
    Ahh, that's a good point xarien, thanks for reminding us of that. The ending "coolcam" is a bit fragile but is engineered in a way that it should be capable of handling variable win conditions, will speak with Nick and Scott about how best to tweak that.
• testing12341234 13y ago
  I gave the first level over to my wife (who is a non-programmer, and has no interest in programming, but loves RPGs). Unfortunately, it didn't work out too well. She was able to make it to the ogre, then then misspelled the attack command. At that point, her browser froze, then continued to give her a script error at "http://codecombat.com/javascripts/vendor.js:52612" http://codecombat.com/javascripts/vendor.js:52612". Which is too bad, because I'd love to show her that programming isn't as "hard" as she thinks it is.
  • gsaines 13y ago
    Sorry about that testing, our server sometimes messes up the code sync; for now, just copy it, delete it, and paste it in again (all the code). We have it on our list of stuff to fix, but didn't expect another traffic spike so soon and so had pushed it off a bit!
    • testing12341234 13y ago
      Unfortunately, she doesn't want to try again. But good luck!
      • gsaines 13y ago
        Yeah, that's understandable, thanks for trying though, we'll have more content soon, and it should be more stable to boot, so perhaps we can impress her at a later date. :)
      • vdaniuk 13y ago
        That is actually a problem in trying to introduce someone to coding. First attempt frequently is experienced as boring and/or too complex. It would be absolutely wonderful to have several standard entry points to programming for various target audiences. There are some cropping up with popular MooC courses but nothing for adults that have a barrier to better understanding that programming is not that hard.
• kgodey 13y ago
  Congrats Nick, Scott, and George! I can't wait to see where you guys go with this.
  • gsaines 13y ago
    Thanks kgodey, we are (understandably) extremely excited to be a part of YC and have the opportunity to really push this project to reach it's full potential.
    • mhartl 13y ago
      Please forgive the pedantry, but I'm on a one-man quest: s/it's full potential/its full potential/. P.S. Congrats on getting into YC!
• ryanjodonnell 13y ago
  This is the same guy from skritter.com. Wonder what's happening to skritter?
  • gsaines 13y ago
    Hi Ryan, we've been working on stabilizing the Skritter code base for the last year, and have hired a team of extremely dedicated and intelligent folks to continue running it. We're planning to make an announcement about our commitment to CodeCombat in the next month or so when we get all the team changes finalized, but needless to say that Skritter is still moving forward.
    • ryanjodonnell 13y ago
      Glad to hear that, skritter is amazing! Good luck with your next endeavours :)
      • gsaines 13y ago
        Definitely, thanks for your understanding!
        • AdamTReineke 13y ago
          It has been a few years since I was on Skritter but I've been debating starting up again. Is it still Flash-based?
        • gsaines 13y ago
          Hey Adam, thanks can't seem to respond to you: but it is, hopefully not for too much longer, can't say too much right now, though. :)
• pla3rhat3r 13y ago
  So happy for these guys! I let my kids play this and they love the game!
  • gsaines 13y ago
    Thanks for the kind words pla3rhat3r, we're hoping to release a bunch of new content soon as well as open up the level editor so folks can contribute their own levels, so please do check back! Also, if you kids find anything we can improve, please let us know.
    • pla3rhat3r 13y ago
      Will do.
• imron 13y ago
  Hey, it's the Skritter guys :-) I knew I recognised the names from somewhere. Best of luck with this new venture!
  • gsaines 13y ago
    Thanks, just for the record, Skritter is still a going concern, but we have shifted our attention over to CodeCombat.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• recursive 13y ago
  The backspace key didn't work for me in the email box in the signup form.
  • nwinter 13y ago
    Ah, right! On our bug list; thanks. Will fix as soon as we can. Server is unhappy again right now with the load.
• aymeric 13y ago
  I think games are a good way to teach the first principles in coding. Last year as a pet project I ported Terrarium.Net to javascript (this is definitely not noob-friendly at the moment but it is open source :) ) http://terrariumjs.wiselabs.net/ http://terrariumjs.wiselabs.net/ The idea is to code the behaviour of a critter that can move / attack / eat and reproduce. So a species that survives well can grow and invade a terrarium. But the cool factor is the blue ball. It is actually a teleporter that sends critters randomly to someone else's terrarium, so your critter can invade other terrariums too :)
• neovive 13y ago
  Congrats to Nick and team. You guys are doing an amazing job and my son loves CodeCombat. Best of luck in YC.
• reneherse 13y ago
  Congrats to the CodeCombat team! Their recruitment-oriented business model reminded me of an 80's movie called The Last Starfighter [1]: A young guy living in the middle of nowhere masters a space fighter arcade game. He has no idea that it's actually a fighter pilot training and recruitment tool until one night, when he's picked up by a "headhunter" (in a spacebound DeLorean) to join the force defending the galaxy against alien invaders. Fun flick, with some decent early CGI. The parallels, I think, really help demonstrate how the CC concept has the potential to change young people's lives. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/
  • gsaines 13y ago
    That is an excellent movie, here's hoping that we can pick up some excellent space pilots, er, devs, with the platform. It's incredible how many people have written to tell us that they started their dev careers building games, I think it's a common entry point. I know that I started working with computers because of a game called gorillas.bas on my dad's Kapro '86 (whopping 3 megahertz processor and 512k hard drive). Here's hoping I'm not the anti-pattern!
• mpr3 13y ago
  This is incredible. I have shown a few people, and they just keep playing and trying to fix their buggy "spells". Nice job guys!
• donpdonp 13y ago
  in-browser programming seems like a great way to get people interested in how code works. here is an earlier site called RubyWarrior that works similarly. https://www.bloc.io/ruby-warrior/ https://www.bloc.io/ruby-warrior/
• gailees 13y ago
  I can help you guys match people who have gone theough the game with the right startups: facebook.com/davefontenot
• aymeric 13y ago
  For graphics, you guys should look at the RPGMaker community. There are plenty of sprites ready to use that would match the universe you have chosen. I am trying to find an adaptation of the http://terrariumjs.wiselabs.net http://terrariumjs.wiselabs.net universe where I could use these sprites instead.
• forktheif 13y ago
  I tried it out briefly, and it came across as extremely buggy and unintuitive.
  • nwinter 13y ago
    Thanks for the feedback--remember anything off the top of your head that you particularly didn't like about it?
• byosko 13y ago
  This is super cool. My kids are going to love this.