The plan for CraftStudio alpha & beyond

I’ve been working on CraftStudio (what is it?) day in and day out since September and it’s really shaping up.

Over the last 5 months, the numerous pre-alpha releases have garnered quite a bit of attention with more than 3000 registered users (thanks in large part to this post on IndieGames.com). You guys have built lots of cool models & maps and gave me tons of valuable feedback!

So what’s next?

I’m really excited to fulfill my vision of CraftStudio as a great platform for:

  • building your games and sharing them (of course!) ;
  • finding people to partner with, and projects to contribute to ;
  • discovering cool games and playing them with your friends.

All of it should of course be fun and easy to use, cross-platform, real-time and reasonably priced so that virtually everyone can afford it. There are many challenges ahead but I’m pretty confident, all the more so as the past months have proven it can (and does!) make for an awesome multiplayer game-building experience.

Crowd funding!

To make it possible to deliver all of this and more, I have set up a crowd-funding campaign on IndieGoGo.

Part of the money raised will go towards keeping me working full time on CraftStudio and delivering awesome features and new releases to backers over the next few months.

But there’s more! Thomas Frick will work with me to make a full, high-quality CraftStudio game (a dungeon crawler with a twist, codename Project Waffle).

Rewards for your contribution include:

  • Premium accounts (basically you’ll get CraftStudio Alpha and then all subsequent updates)
  • Copies of the finished “Project Waffle” game
  • CraftStudio / Project Waffle t-shirts
  • Spectator access to Project Waffle’s server so you can spy on us while we make the game!
  • And more cool stuff!

 

So, how would you like to help fund a revolution in how games are made? Contribute and spread the word on Twitter, on Facebook, on Google+, on Hacker News, on Reddit and with your friends!

Thanks for your support!

Codebot: teaching programming as a game

I just spent the night on building Codebot, a little Web-based prototype for learning programming by playing.

In Codebot, you’re tasked with taking a robot from point A to point B by… writing a program! See for yourself:

You can try it out too. Obviously this is just basic demo. The game could be expanded with more levels, each teaching new programming concepts. For instance a level could sport enemies and traps whose behaviors or positions change from run to run, and the player would have to make its robot’s program able to sense them and take decisions based on its surroundings.

I was able to build this prototype in just four hours by using the following amazing open source projects:

  • Three.js for rendering (using WebGL)
  • Lua.js, an implementation of the Lua programming language in JavaScript. I planned to go with an emscriptened version of Lua first but there was no neatly-packaged ready-to-use build so I gave up.
  • Ace, a powerful code editor widget for the Web with many cool features, coupled with these Lua highlight rules

Pretty awesome how fast and far you can go with the right tools. Thanks a lot to everyone who contributed to these!

I hope to take this experiment further later on, but for now, I have a lot work to do to get ready for a big CraftStudio-related announcement on March 13th… See you then!