Other worlds or stories, and other features

I think it’s probably bad timing and it would require a complete redesign, but I’ll come up with those ideas anyway:

  1. While medieval games might sound appealing to most, I think it would be more appropriate, more informative, maybe even more fun and generally better in every sense if it were a fictional world of programmers and computers. That’s not just replacing the skin, that’s a story that could also teach the soon to be programmers more about computers history. And, to make it fun, just add fictional facts to it. For instance, there could be 1 mysterious time traveler guy behind all great computer inventions. Brainstorming on this could bring many good ideas. :slight_smile:

  2. As for features, I think buying items and getting levels is an old concept (in general for all games) that could be upgraded. Not sure how, though. I only know some games are already doing it. Achievements are a much better concept anyway. I would start by dropping the hero leveling and detaching new functions from buying items. Having restricted functions on the beginner levels make all the sense, but that could simply be restricted by the level in itself. And we could still have gems to buy vestments just for the looks. People would already do it just for that anyway!

  3. I’d also make all levels open and playable, and simply keep track of the ones played or conquested, like it already is done, adding a green circle on the next suggested level to play, to make the path.

  4. Another one would be about the flag. I’d just drop it. There’s already the level maker and for beating levels it’s much more interesting trying to build better AI s than resorting to human intervention.

I’m now with the feeling this could be a fork! Hmm… :alien:

Maybe it’s time for you to take up teh Gauntlets of Programming, and code this yourself :wink:

I can only wish it would be that simple…

Can’t find my gauntlets, probably taken by some leprechaun. And even if I found it, I couldn’t do all of it alone with all the bananas around me.

Sounds neat. unfortunately the fantasy medieval theme is the #1 thing that drew me in. If it were space or real life i doubt i would have any interest playing or working on the project. :slight_smile: To each their own i suppose.

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Put down the bananas, and find your guantlets! :wink:

I agree with sotonin. The medieval / simple / fantasy look really drew me in. I think part of that is my old addiction to WoW (been clean from WoW for about… 6’ish years!!!), and how this feeds that addiction… but in a healthy way. :wink: Plus the simplicity & medieval-ness is a fantastic juxtaposition towards us doing future-forward coding.

Now that’s just a sample of two, but I believe most players here will be highly biased…

That being said, nothing is forbidding us to make this new story a big mixed mock up and the mysterious time traveler being a wizard from medieval times or w/e. :man_with_gua_pi_mao:

As for the bananas, I’m trying but they’re yummy! :yum:

Is this the feature suggestions topic now? :smile:
I’ve played through the free levels up to The Trials (where the final bigboss Oracle shaman shoots me dead before I could walk up to her) and here’s what I’d add:

1, Foreach:
Somewhere between loop and while, you could introduce foreach. I find it the most natural loop construct (where applicable.)
In fact I don’t know how players are supposed to know how to iterate through an array. I was really trying to get through the levels using only the programming concepts introduced by the game itself (javascript), and I had to cheat with array.length.

2, Less emphasis on gear and realtime:
I was expecting to command or program a whole army after a while, not run around with my tricked out hero chasing mouse clicks.

3, Transactions on the server side:
When the browser freezes after winning a brawl, it is possible to see difficulty increase, but the loot not credited to the account! That’s really annoying after having honed my algorithm for days (pesky cooldown period) and no other way to win more gems.
Bumping the difficulty and crediting the loot should have been an all-or-nothing transaction on the server, failing one should have rolled back the other.

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All I can say for all 4 points is “Me too!”. I also played up to The Trials, which is unbeatable; I also missed foreach, which in python is just for; I even said the same thing as “less emphasis on gear and real time” already (on items 2 and 4), and; I also think the game in general is surprisingly slow and heavy, although I don’t feel it too much in my machine.

Although I won just 1 brawl and found no such bug. That sounds like a bug indeed. :bug:

@Cawas, your points 2, 3, and 4 sound like our old levels: http://codecombat.com/play-old

For 1: we’ve thought about different art themes and whether or not there’s a good fit to the story, but we have decided not. If you want to draw a lot of new sprites, you could do your own campaign with a different theme. But our illustrators are pretty busy with our preferred fantasy theme.

@szocske, we decided that while would lead to a better progression, but we still have some tuning and balancing to do on the pacing there to smooth it out; it’s definitely missing some steps right now. for will come soon, in the mountain map, alongside summoning and controlling minion troops.

It would really help to keep bug reports like freezing-after-winning-a-brawl in their own threads, or better yet, on our GitHub issues with normal bug report details.

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So medieval was chosen based on your personal preferences and love to WoW and LotR, I see… :stuck_out_tongue:

And why have you decided to add all that stuff in? Those I’d like to see “implemented”, though I’m not hopeful anything here will. :innocent:


From another topic I thought of a new approach for idea #1. The whole computer programmer fiasco theme would be dropped and the core of the idea (teaching more about computer history) could be fit in this medieval theme.

Take big electronic machines and paper computing early on, for instance. Those could be replaced by steam computers and instead of using paper use some well ornamented carved stones (which is not too far from disks, by the way). Call that level / resource Charles Babbage. And the first level talking about history could bring actual stuff from that era

And I’ll keep on dreaming… :dragon_face:


Another thing about point (2):

The whole current item system is basically non-sensical since there is no way to accumulate gems other than buying them. So the gems are basically useless on the “free to play” track, as it is right now. If that’s by design, I think this is another point to drop it.

However, if this was better balanced and gems started making some sense, then having new functions attached to items could be cool. Maybe. I guess my point here is it has to be part of the gameplay, not just work as an achievement.