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CodeCombat in Y Combinator

by skotzko on 10/23/13, 9:05 PM with 82 comments

• by sillysaurus2 on 10/23/13, 10:25 PM

  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.

• by iamkoby on 10/23/13, 10:01 PM

  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!

• by reneherse on 10/24/13, 1:25 AM

  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/

• by mhamel on 10/23/13, 10:23 PM

  And every company after them in Office Hours walked just a little bit slower leaving the stage...

• by iamshs on 10/23/13, 10:14 PM

  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?

• by testing12341234 on 10/23/13, 10:48 PM

  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".

  Which is too bad, because I'd love to show her that programming isn't as "hard" as she thinks it is.

• by woud420 on 10/23/13, 10:13 PM

  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.

• by aymeric on 10/24/13, 12:41 AM

  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/

  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 :)

• by xarien on 10/23/13, 10:41 PM

  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.

• by aymeric on 10/24/13, 6:13 AM

  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 universe where I could use these sprites instead.

• by ryanjodonnell on 10/23/13, 10:53 PM

  This is the same guy from skritter.com. Wonder what's happening to skritter?

• by forktheif on 10/24/13, 7:38 AM

  I tried it out briefly, and it came across as extremely buggy and unintuitive.

• by atldev on 10/23/13, 10:31 PM

  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 :)

• by mpr3 on 10/24/13, 2:51 AM

  This is incredible. I have shown a few people, and they just keep playing and trying to fix their buggy "spells". Nice job guys!

• by gailees on 10/24/13, 4:11 AM

  I can help you guys match people who have gone theough the game with the right startups: facebook.com/davefontenot

• by neovive on 10/24/13, 1:07 AM

  Congrats to Nick and team. You guys are doing an amazing job and my son loves CodeCombat. Best of luck in YC.

• by asselinpaul on 10/23/13, 10:30 PM

  Was chatting with a someone from CodeCombat on olark. they had no idea it was on HN but the traffic was booming.

  Ah startups...

• by donpdonp on 10/24/13, 3:17 AM

  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/

• by kgodey on 10/23/13, 10:50 PM

  Congrats Nick, Scott, and George! I can't wait to see where you guys go with this.

• by imron on 10/23/13, 11:45 PM

  Hey, it's the Skritter guys :-)

  I knew I recognised the names from somewhere.

  Best of luck with this new venture!

• by recursive on 10/24/13, 12:23 AM

  The backspace key didn't work for me in the email box in the signup form.

• by pla3rhat3r on 10/23/13, 11:23 PM

  So happy for these guys! I let my kids play this and they love the game!

• by byosko on 10/24/13, 2:08 PM

  This is super cool. My kids are going to love this.