CODE HERO IS NOW IN PRIVATE BETA: CHECK OUT SCREENSHOTS.

Alex Peake's 28c3 Talk, "Code Hero: Hacking The Planet" at Chaos Communications Congress Berlin

Submitted by lxpk on Mon, 2012-01-02 23:25

In Alex Peake's 28c3 talk video from the Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin, Alex talks about Code Hero as a game gateway into mastering the technology stack and making a planet of makerhoods by creating creative communities.

 

Alex also spoke at Berlinsides and on Wednesday at 8PM Hamburg time Alex is speaking at Attraktor Hamburg, the first hackerspace on the planet. Pictures and reports from Code Hero's connections with the motherland of maker hacker culture in Germany will follow soon!

Code Hero Kickstarter



I heard you liked video games so I made you a game called Code Hero that teaches you how to make games with a code gun that shoots Javascript inside Unity3D.

Master code from the inside out to make games and apps of your own to become the next code hero!

You enter the World of Code as a Primer Labs Game Tester and enroll in the mysterious Gamebridge Unityversity to be mentored by the inventors of programming and computers Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage Alan Turing and the other Code Heroes of the Humantheon. You'll need their help to master the secrets of Codefoo to defeat the many FizzBosses to ultimately beat ShipBoss by making a game of your own to earn a place as a Shipped Officer on the Real Artists Ship!

I'm Alex Peake the founder of Primer Labs and I've spent the last year building Primer Labs as a bootstrapped startup with the Code Hero team creating this game so you could play it. Now you can get the beta today and preorder the full game by funding its development!

The Challenge: Kickstart Your Game!

Our kickstarter is for 60 days. We don't want you to wait till the end to see if we make it. We want you to get the game today so you can complete our challenge for you: Start playing and learning how to code. Make your own game and make something awesome to submit to kickstarter yourself! We'll send a Primer Labs lab coat to everyone who posts their game on Kickstarter in the next 60 days before our kickstarter ends!

You can find more details about our Kickstarter at http://primerlabs.com/kickstarter.

We're setting up the account creation system to give funders access to the game. Give us a little while to figure it out as this is our first kickstarter and we're not sure how it works yet!


Nominate Code Hero for a Game Developer's Choice Award

Submitted by lxpk on Thu, 2011-12-15 22:37

Notch and Minecraft won GDC's Best Debut Game last year, and we'd love to grow Code Hero's launch big enough by GDC to have a shot at winning this thing!

  1. Create a Gamasutra account if you don't already have one. (Worth doing anyways).
  2. Nominate Code Hero for the Game Developer's Choice awards!

Code Hero @ Minecon 2011 Pictures, Video Coming Soon!

Submitted by lxpk on Thu, 2011-12-15 21:45

Code Hero Beta launched at MineCon as exhibitors in the Indy Showcase Notch generously invited to participate. 

We interviewed Minecraft developer Jeb_ to appear in the game and we've got a PennyArcadeTV-inspired video show taking you with us on our adventures as an indy seeking to democratize indiehood.

See the photo preview!

Code Hero to be at Casual Connect Europe 2012

Submitted by lxpk on Thu, 2011-12-15 13:41

Code Hero will be at the Casual Connect Europe game developer conference in Hamburg February 7-9!

We were launching Code Hero at Minecon when we met Julia from Casual Connect, a magazine for the European game developer community and the organizers of the 7th Casual Connect Europe conference.

This is going to be a B2B event for developers, publishers and distributors from all over the world with more than 1500 professionals this year. The conference will take place on 7-9 February in Congress Center Hamburg (5 minutes from Hamburg downtown). 

All the details are on the official website: http://europe.casualconnect.org 

CC in Hamburg will have over 40 industry expert lectures on general interest, Social, Mobile, Platforms, Production and Business tracks spanning two lecture halls with parallel lectures.

There will be over 70 exhibitors and a special Games for Gamers exhibition, showcasing 14 awesome games, including Code Hero, where people will be able to play the game.

There will also be three epic parties at the best Hamburg locations where the real fun networking happens!

We'll have Primer Labs Europe team members exhibiting Code Hero at the show. If you'll be in Hamburg for the show and you'd like to connect with us or volunteer to help with our booth, contact us at events@primerlabs.com

Check out the previous issues of Casual Connect Magazine here:

http://casualconnect.org/magazine-archive/

We're writing an article for Casual Connect Magazine that will appear soon!

Ada Lovelace is Steve Jobs author Walter Issacson's next biography subject

Submitted by lxpk on Thu, 2011-12-15 03:56

Steve Jobs bio author Walter Isaacson has picked Ada Lovelace as the subject of his next biography. Here's the article:

At an appearance Wednesday night in San Francisco, he said he felt he had earned the right to pick someone less iconic, and pluck her out of obscurity. "I want to give Ada Lovelace her moment in the sun," he said.

The daughter of poet Lord Byron, Lovelace helped the development of the analytical engine -- the first incarnation of a general purpose computer with Charles Babbage, considered the father of the computer. She is credited with inventing the algorithm and pioneering the idea that writing software could make a computer perform different functions. Though not a household name, Lovelace is better known in the computer science world, and is already the subject of older biographies. Her penchant for math came from her mother's desire to make sure Lovelace was nothing like her absent father.

More broadly, he believes women in technology will be the wave of this century. His premise has already started to unfold, as a few women hold top jobs at the world's most prominent tech companies, like Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Google VP Marissa Mayer. The tech landscape will only move more in this direction, he said, because women were left out of engineering and science for such a long time. "And when you leave out a large part of the population, things change when they suddenly become a part of it," he said.

This will be great news for Code Hero fans as we'll be get a detailed look into the life of one of history's greatest inventors.

Code Hero Angelhack featured in Business Insider

Submitted by primer on Sat, 2011-12-10 03:21

Primer Labs met Business Insider journalist Boonsri Dickinson as we prepared our presentation at Angelhack and she featured a shot of our deck's hackerspace slide in their photo essay and article about the hackathon:

TheNextWeb Interview: Code Hero's D2020 Gameathon Launches at AngelHack & Wins Random Hacks of Kindness

Submitted by lxpk on Thu, 2011-12-08 00:59

Alex Peake was interviewed by Hermione Way for TheNextWeb's Startups of AngelHack 2011 about Code Hero and the launch of D2020, a hack the planetathon to inspire developers to create 2020 games to change the world by 2020. D2020 was created and launched by parallel teams at Angelhack and Random Hacks of Kindness SF Hackathon, where it won honors and an XBox Kinect which will serve as a gestural interface testbed for the Code Hero team's UX experiments.

The Raymond Code Dare

Submitted by lxpk on Wed, 2011-11-23 08:03

If you had 30 days to become a game developer or lose everything, what would you do? I met a guy at the SF VNV Nation concert who was sad. He wanted a VNV Nation hoodie but he couldn't pay his rent if he bought it. I decided to call him Raymond.

I asked, "What do you do that you can't pay your rent?"

"I work at the Academy of Art," he said, sighing.

"Isn't that a place that teaches game development?"

"I wish I was a game developer! I serve food in the cafeteria."

I bought the hoodie from the nice man at the merch table.

I found Raymond, thrust the hoodie into his hands and grabbed him by the shoulders:

"RAYMOND! WHAT DID YOU WANT TO BE, A GAME DEVELOPER? IF YOU'RE NOT ON YOUR WAY TO PLAYING CODE HERO,  LEARNING UNITY GAME DEVELOPMENT AND MENTORING KIDS AT GAMEBRIDGE UNITYVERSITY IN 30 DAYS, YOU WILL BE SAD - AND YOU'LL HAVE TO RETURN THIS VNV NATION HOODIE!"

We're going to see what he is capable of and I'll post updates for the next 30 days about our bet. I am going to mentor him but I am also winning if he gives up because I really want the VNV hoodie!

Do you think Raymond will show up for Unityversity and earn his future and his hoodie?

Do you have any words of advice for Raymond?

I encourage you to take the Raymond Code Dare too:

Push yourself to learn Unity for the next 30 days starting when you read this. Comment when you start the challenge and comment when you need encouragement or are on your way to shipping something after 30 days!

DO YOU ACCEPT?

Code Hero Launch At Minecon An Epic Success

Submitted by lxpk on Tue, 2011-11-22 18:10

"I was blown away by Code Hero at Minecon, I think it was the game that took the show, well besides Minecraft of course. The Graphics were beautiful, and the Idea mind blowing. Cant wait to show it off to others. Great Job!!"

—Joshua Lily

We launched at Minecon and the response was overwhelming! We've got a blog, video and photo feature of the whole event coming soon with our first big newsletter and more announcements. To all who've bought the preorder, you are our first fans and it has been an amazing experience watching the orders ring a bell every time they come in. We're hard at work bringing the Windows build up to speed with the Mac so that we can get the beta out to you by December 1st.

Thank you to everyone at Mojang and Minecon for being so great to us and championing indy gaming especially Notch, Jeb, Lydia, Leo and Heather!

Nominate Code Hero for a TechCrunch Crunchie Award

Submitted by lxpk on Sat, 2011-11-19 11:06

We're excited about being in the running for many of the TechCrunch Crunchies award categories especially Best New Technology, Bootstrapped Startup, Founder, Best New Startup!

 Nominate Code Hero here!

Code Hero is launching at Minecon Las Vegas!

Submitted by lxpk on Sat, 2011-11-19 10:05

Code Hero is at Minecon! Come and meet the Code Hero team to try and buy the beta of the game for the first time in the Indy Games Exhibition at Minecon!

We've met thousands of the most amazing young people and adults alike, and the response has been beyond anything we ever imagined!

One of the most amazing young people I met was this boy who was so small he had to stand on a chair to reach the keyboard and mouse and so smart that he's in precalculus and so quick at learning programming that he would have beat the game in one sitting/standing if there hadn't been a line of people wanting to get their hands on it too!

He was the first person to ask for my autograph and I have the feeling that he is going to produce some amazing code hero exploits in the future!

First Post: Help me help immortalize Alan Kay and Doug Engelbart in the Humantheon Code Hero Hall

Submitted by lxpk on Thu, 2011-11-17 05:29

In my first "blog post" as a Code Hero team member I'm asking for your help to capture the essence of two of the greatest code heroes who have ever lived, Alan Kay and Doug Engelbart. Please consider how you can help immortalize our legendary hackers in Code Hero Hall in the days ahead because we've just lost Steve and Ritchie and McCarthy and now our dear friend Ilya at age 22 and we are losing too many heroes and we could lose any of us at any second before we have time to put our legacies into words and worlds and pathways for future hackers to follow in our footsteps. It brings me to tears to think how young we lost Ilya while the greatest programmers who've ever lived are still alive with us today and that we still have time to enlist their help inspiring the greatest hackers who will ever make their mark on tomorrow.


Ilya Zhitomirskiy touched many people's hearts at Noisebridge, and embodied the hacker spirit.
As a member of our family he will forever remain in our hearts.

Today is November 17, 2011 and I've lost track of how many days of crunch this makes it since we began pushing towards preordered private beta release to our supporters.

Today I met Alan Kay the founder of object oriented programming and graphical personal computing who handed the technological torch the XEROX PARC team created in the first Alto to Steve Jobs and Apple to ignite the affordable Macintosh. All I know is, we're about to talk to Alan Kay and Doug Engelbart the father of mice and bootstrapping and so many things in one mother of all demos that you just have to watch it yourself. I'm talking to Alan and Doug about immortalizing them in the Humantheon Code Hero Hall.

I want you to submit interview question ideas and mission scenarios for Code Hero that you could imagine playing through to capture some of the genius of these greats to relive their foundational achievements, to help them with their Bootstrapping Collective IQ Initiative and Viewpoint Institute educational research today, and to take their innovations to a whole new level with something big and bold that helps invent the future so we can solve our greatest problems faster enough to reach escape velocity.

Please comment with your questions, scenarios and immortalization ideas here or email me at questions@primerlabs.com.

Thomas Suarez: The TEDgrader

Submitted by primer on Mon, 2011-11-14 02:12

Thomas Suarez is in the 6th grade at a middle school in the South Bay. And while most of his peers are probably fussing over new soccer kleets or watching the Disney channel, he’s creating iOS apps and giving TED Talks.

Suarez, whose not even old enough to have a Facebook account, has been fascinated by computers and technology since before kindergarten. He’s established his own company, CarrotCorp and has made two iOS apps that are currently in the App Store: Earth Fortune, which displays different colors of Earth depending on what your fortune is and his most successful- Bustin Jieber, a Whac-a-Mole for Justin Bieber.

“A lot of kids these days like to play games, but now they want to make them,” he says. “And it’s difficult because not many kids know where to go find out how to make a program…And not many parents have written apps.” Suarez, inspired by Steve Jobs, started an App Club at school where any student can come to learn to design an app. In the future, Suarez wants to create more apps, more games and get into Android programming and development. He plans on continuing his app club and find other ways for students to share knowledge with others.

Knowing that human beings such as Suarez exist makes me really hopeful and excited for the future. Watch his TED Talk from the recent TEDx conference in Manhattan Beach here:

Source: TheNextWeb

Ilya Zhitomirsky, The Diasporafather

Ilya Zhitomirsky was a cofounder of the freedom-championing social network Diaspora and a dear friend of ours at Primer Labs. If you want to see this succeed and to take up the cause Ilya championed, check out Diaspora and join the team to help!

He will be missed and remembered and championed as the ideas he cared about so passionately need our support now more than ever that freedom and choice should not perish from the earth.

His loss is a reminder to all of us that no code hero is immortal and youth is no guarantee of survival. Startup founders go through the worst ups and downs of the rollercoaster between being on the cusp of taking over the world and plunging to the depths of feeling hopeless and doomed.

We must take the greatest care to be there for each other and to ask each other how we really are to break through all the hiding we do to tell ourselves and our friends that everything is okay. Sometimes things are not okay and we need someone to talk to so we can get through the lows.

Beyond every challenge and crisis is the next idea or the next pivot or the next startup opportunity because all of us have a few more tricks up our sleeve or lucky turnarounds or world-changing ideas in us no matter what happens with the ones we're working on now.

World Future Summit Talk To Invite Futurists To Code The Games They Wish To See

Submitted by primer on Sat, 2011-11-12 10:34

I just submitted my WorldFuture 2012 Toronto talk and here's the interactive session we're planning for the event! We're looking forward to seeing what kind of future-playing game scenarios a room full of the world's foremost futurists will create together! 

TALK TITLE: Code Hero: Code The Game You Wish To See
Code Hero is a game that teaches us how to make games that will teach everything else. In a world where we can code the games we wish to see, we have the power to make all knowledge playable. Games that teach and inspire can do more than gamify skill acquisition. Inspirational games can also help us role-play new career paths and  discover new personal aspirations for ourselves. But there is one more thing that games can do that can shape our collective destiny, and that is to show us our future and how our life choices will shape it, to drive us to take bigger risks to make a dent in the universe. The future we create depends on the courage of the questions we ask of ourselves and the roles we play on the world stage. The power to make the games we wish to play is the power to code the change we wish to see.
TAKEAWAY:
Participants will learn hands-on how to write Javascript and make their own video game in Unity3D that explores a future scenario. Give players aspirational choices with collective consequences that shape the future in a way that players can act upon to live up to the outcome they've played. Bring scenario ideas and/or a laptop and pre-install Unity from http://www.Unity3D.com and Code Hero from http://www.primerlabs.com or team up with others who have it. 
SPEAKER:
Alex Peake founded Primer Labs to make all knowledge playable by creating Code Hero, a game that teaches you how to make games that can teach everything else. Alex cofounded HackTheFuture.org hacker mentoring events for young future hackers and Tactical Corsets heroic high-function fashion. The Code Hero Beta and Alex's recent talks from Humanity+, the Open Science Summit and others are at http://www.primerlabs.com.

Code Hero Wins Innovation Award @ SF Beta

Submitted by primer on Fri, 2011-11-11 10:11

Code Hero won the Innovation Award at the SF Beta Startup Mixer for Mobile Games on November 8th as attendees flocked to see the latest Code Hero demo. Here's the announcement:

Innovation Award winner: Code Hero

Complimenting our People’s Choice Award, we’re pleased to announce the newly formed Innovation Award, bestowed upon SF Beta startups that grace our event with game-changing, revolutionary, category-creating concepts.

Code Hero is edutainment (remember that?) at its finest — a game that teaches you how to make games with a code gun that copies, edits and shoots Javascript in Unity3D. I’m pretty sure I met Alex Peake, the company’s founder, at a flash mob in the Mission district several years ago, proving that San Francisco really is the smallest town in the world.

Our booth was packed with people getting their hands on Code Hero for the first time:

 

Audiences were captivated by Code Hero's approach towards learning programming in 3D as many non-programmers saw for the first time a way they could break into coding and actually enjoy learning Javascript and Unityscript. 

 

 

 

Experienced programmers got a laugh from seeing how the classic FizzBuzz job interview question is transformed into a horde of 100 angry FizzBots in Code Hero's FizzBoss challenge to combine Javascript algorithms and Unity game code.

 


Code Hero Has One More Thing To Announce at SF Beta: Mobile Games Nov 8 2011

Submitted by primer on Tue, 2011-11-01 15:40

SF Beta: The Bay Area’s Finest Startup Mixer

Now in our sixth year, SF Beta is San Francisco’s largest and longest-running startup mixer. Taking place every two months, we draw regular sell-out crowds of over 500 founders, VCs, developers, and more.

Join us to meet the Code Hero team and be amongst the very first to get your hands on the game that teaches you how to make game and try this one more thing we are announcing! 

The most recent launch of Boston Beta drew a sellout crowd of 400 people. Twenty startups demoed, vying for our People's Choice Award,  given to the company who collects the greatest number of chips from our audience, each worth "$10,000" and ArtVenue raised a staggering $900,000!

REGISTER WHILE TICKET SUPPLIES LAST FOR SF BETA: MOBILE GAMES TUESDAY NOVEMBER 8

Hero of the Month: Markus Notch Perrson, The Minefather

File:Notch3.jpgMarkus Alexej Persson, more commonly known as Notch, is the creator of Minecraft and the owner of Mojang AB.

Notch is Code Hero of the Month of November 2011!

Notch made the world safe for indy games with Minecraft bootstrapping through fan support and as we have just launched our preorder for Code Hero Beta, we are crossing our brain cells and studying the sciences of indycraft at the School That Notch Built. Notch, you are my code hero and I hope we can help make you proud of the indy gaming that you've liberated! 

-Alex

Creation Myth

Persson started programming at the age of seven, using his dad's Commodore 128. He produced his first game (a text-adventure) at the age of eight, with the help of type-in programs. Later he started working as a game developer for King.com, which he left after four years to work as a programmer over at Jalbum. During this time he also founded the MMORPG Wurm Online, although he no longer works on this. Outside of work he frequently takes part in competitions, including Ludum Dare, LD12 and the Java 4K Game Programming Contest. He lived in Denmark before he moved to Sweden with his parents and went to school there. 

Notch has his own part of the Mojang website that can be found here. 

Read Notch's Blog! 

Buy Minecraft! (As though there is anyone who hasn't already played and bought it!)

Code Hero Talk & Panel at Open Science Summit 2011

Submitted by primer on Mon, 2011-10-31 03:18

Alex Peake spoke at the Open Science Summit 2011 at the Moutain View Computer History Museum about some of humanity's worst investment decisions: rejecting Demoritus' atomic theory, ignoring Galileo's heliocentric astronomy, Napoleon passing on Fulton's submarine until it was too late for it to rescue him, unfunding Charles Babbage's 1860s Difference Engine and Analytic Engine computers, and educational descrimination against women and other "wrong sorts of people" which withheld mathematics from more than half of humanity despite failing to stop Lady Ada Lovelace from learning math and inventing computer software in 1862.

WATCH ALEX'S TALK AT 0:30 HERE followed by a panel run by Mitch Altman with Alex, Mitch, Jimmy and the Stanford Eterna and Foldit team.

Today's challenges demand that we set minds free and abolish educational discrimination to achieve full literacy starting with code literacy so that everyone can explore the world of code and invent the future.

Alex showed the Hack The Future mentoring event and demoed the Code Hero game including a mission where you help Ada and Charles Babbage construct a 3D replica of the Difference Engine whose replica is actually built and working in its entirety at the Computer Histroy Museum.

A new version of the talk video with clarified visuals and audio is coming soon.

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