It’s hard to describe how much fun building CodeCombat has been for us. We’ve been working on this since February, and seeing it come together and showing it to others and receiving all this encouragement in the past week has boosted our happiness and energy sky-high. I personally can barely sleep at this point; I have to run around Berkeley just to temper the giddiness.
There are many people and organizations to thank, but one group in particular we have to thank is the open source community. The resources available for us to build upon are truly awesome. It’s a genie with infinite wishes; if we want a library or piece of software for one purpose or another, most often it’s just there on GitHub. And then there’s Stack Overflow, practically an oracle with millions of answers to tricky programming problems at the ready. Would that all the pieces and knowledge required for any labor of love be so accessible.
We want CodeCombat to be a part of that.
With any luck, this site will become much more than just a game for people to play. We want people involved and owning it at every level, from building campaigns to personally helping teach each other concepts to playing with and against one another to building the site itself. That’s a big challenge, and we can’t and don’t want to do it alone. CodeCombat should be about the programming community itself and how much fun it is to be part of it.
To that end, we’ve organized several ‘character classes’ people can choose from and subscribe to, representing roles crucial to what we want CodeCombat to become. If you’d like to help us make CodeCombat great, one or more of these classes might be for you:
- Archmage: help code the game itself on GitHub
- Artisan: build levels with our online level editor
- Adventurer: playtest new levels first
- Scribe: write articles (wiki pages on coding concepts levels can link to)
- Diplomat: translate levels into other languages
- Ambassador: help other wizards learn to code
- Counselor: teachers and domain experts whose brains we can pick
See our Contribute page for more information on these character classes and what they do. Many of these roles will be on standby as we build the tools required. Diplomats can’t start translating until we add support for multiple languages, for example, and we’re not yet sure when that will happen. But volunteer for a character class and we’ll keep you posted on new developments.
Thanks again to everyone for getting involved. We’re super psyched to be here and eager to work together to make this thing!