I just found CodeCombat today and really liked how things are setup in the Beginner levels. Clear explanations, gradual introduction of new concepts and plenty of space to practice new things before getting bombarded with new stuff.
I blazed through those in one sitting, and poked around for the next step, excited for more. The forums seem to suggest I should try one of the “random harder levels” or “user generated levels” as my next step, and that’s when my problems started.
All of a sudden, I went from “here, practice this.moveXY()” a bunch of times to “here’s a whole lotta code you’ve never seen before, good luck”
Are there more explanatory levels that can take a complete noob like me through all that other stuff? Should I keep looking for them? Or is it meant for people who know a bit more of what they’re doing? Am I supposed to just keep trying stuff until I stop dying every five seconds?
Also, is there a complete listing of levels somewhere? From the way the Levels page is organized, it’s suggesting that it’s displaying only a sampling of available content. If not and this is it, totally cool! Just would be nice to know.
I agree with you. I have some programming experience (though not in Javascript) and even i was shocked by the sudden change of pace.
The problem is that, now that the project is open source, level creation is largely being handed over to the community (any developer may contradict me here).If you take a look at the github issue page, you’ll see that the developers themselves are focusing on making the tools to make levels,the site, etc. better.
So i am pretty sure that all the levels you see, are the ones who are officially ‘released’. If you go to the level editor, you will see that there are about 60+ levels being made by community members, but a lot of them are not ready to be played yet.
You can always test them, give feedback and become an adventurer or try to create a level yourself. This is of course not really helpful if you’re a beginner, but i don’t think there is an alternative right now.
We’re doing content, but we’re also juggling and experimenting with several things at once, especially other kinds of content. We’ve been working on two large pieces if content (and the required infrastructure) the last couple months: brawlwood and dungeon arena for multiplayer, and around new years gridmancer, and before that the beginner campaign leading up to hour of code. We’re antsy to getting back to working on the beginner content some more, tuning and expanding it.
The thing with content is it’s just about the hardest and most time consuming thing to do on CodeCombat. To build good quality levels people want to play, we need to spend a lot of time building, learning, testing, and experimenting. We’ll put in that time, making sure it happens, and it will take a while. But building a complete, cohesive beginner campaign is not something we are relying on the community to do themselves, for us. The more people experiment themselves and try things out and contribute, the faster we’ll go, but we’re also continually pushing things forward ourselves. So many things to do!
So yeah, thanks for your positive feedback! If you’re signed up and have announcements enabled we’ll keep you posted about our latest content, both our own and by artisans. It’s super fun and exciting getting to work with you guys.
@scott - thanks for your reply! I love what you’re doing and really looking forward to seeing where you take the project next.
In the meantime, are there things that us noobs can do that would be useful? I was thinking of making a list of all the new code in the one-star-rated levels that made me go “WAAAH what is this??” so you would have a concrete set of things that are freaking out at least one newbie to work from when you do get to designing more beginner levels. Would that be helpful?
The best thing you can do is sign up for all the contributor email lists that you’re interested in (read more about contributor classes here). Sounds like you want to be an adventurer, so be sure you’ve got that selected at least. That way when we do announcements of levels in production, you’ll be the first to know, and we’ll keep you posted in general on testing news.
In the victory screen you can put reviews in, any comments like that would go there (you can only get to them when you’ve won the level, though… probably should have a way for people who couldn’t get through the level to let us know what stumped them).
Other than that, just need your patience as we get this machine of new content running more and more
