Servers fixed. Sorry for anyone who couldn't get to the site.

Quite right. Code hero is fun as a creative challenge, but story and conflict are what drives the player to give them a REASON to make each creative leap. There is a sandbox mode where you can create and eventually share your worlds, but to start the priority is for young people who try it to get hooked enough so we can turn them into coders.

I loved Enter The Matrix and played it all the way through with a friend. Good example. Matrix had bullet time, Code Hero has codefoo.

Both Tron and MAtrix are big inspirations but we take the actual literal reality of what exists in a 3D game engine world simulation as the rules of the land rather than making up movie-friendly metaphors with nerdy words. Matrix and Tron and Star Wars are all essentially fantasy sci fi: Lots of fun, but not closely linked to a physical reality. Although Code Hero takes place in a Matrix-like world, it has definite rules which players can master and exploit and one can parlay that mastery into creating your own games and pursuing other computer science inspired paths.

We're working to make the visuals more informative and interactive gameplay-wise than being merely eye-candy. Hence the green walls of code are not japanese gibberish but javascript that can be read and used and manipulated.

If you see a pretty graphical effect, the code glowing in it may in fact be the shader code that generates itself.

There are indeed heavy permissions on what you can eval in-game. Circumventing some of those is half the fun.

Creator here: Copying code is analogous to finding items in a regular RPG FPS. You can bind code to any hotkey on the keyboard till you are bristling with tools for creating and combating anything imaginable. But you can also instantly edit the code mid-combat or while solving puzzles to tweak variables at first and eventually to write your own code to solve problems.

Gamer gamers can enjoy this without knowing exactly how code works, but the story is full of actual training opportunities that teach you from syntax up to actual game development in Unity3D.

Noisebridge.net Hackerspace represent :) How many slashdotters haven't been to a hackerspace yet?

http://www.Hackerspaces.org has a list of hackerspaces in your area, check them out.

That art was all done by us programmers in prototyping gameplay. We have artists, they're working on stuff that's not in the trailer yet :)

Code Hero is about creating the future, and we definitely care about making it fun for players who want to build and accomplish things that really mean something for humanity. First and foremost, Code Hero is designed to spur real accomplishment so the conflicts and challenges in the game are spurring the player to acheive real code mastery and creativity that could set lives in new directions and spur invention and achievement which benefits us all.

Slashdot has been the place I connected with my fellow geeks and hackers since I was a 12 year old newb, and this is our way of spreading the gift of geek in a way that every person can get into.

Hahaha, that's one Null pun we hadn't thought of yet.

We're developing on Unity3D, which is free but not open-source. As much of the game code as possible will be open and exposed to the player in-game without breaking the security model and content created in Code Hero will be importable to and exportable from Unity3D. There's a code.license and code.permissions field, so it is possible that player could choose how to license the code they create.

Well it looks like this time we got well and truly slashdotted. Our site is down! It's an honor.

Hi! I tried to post earlier but I probably got tab-sidetracked after hitting Preview.

I founded Primer Labs and created Code Hero.

Thanks for all your excellent feedback!

This is our second time on Slashdot in a month as my talk about autocatalyzing mentor AI was linked here to the article based on the transcript of the video:

http://primerlabs.com/slashdottedaccelor8r

In a nutshell, game AI that teaches kids how to code better game AI that teach kids how to code better game AI until the kids start to pick up the traits of their new additional parental mentors.

The graphics there in the trailer were just prototypes made by us programmers.

The final art design has only begun.

We'll have more to announce soon, but I'm happy to answer questions here or by email at alex@primerlabs.com

If you are a Unity3D-experienced or curious developer interested in contributing, contact careers@primerlabs.com.

We're working on a balance between puzzle exploration and action so both kinds of players will be happy.

It's a very proactively secured eval but when players do crash the game in interesting ways we want to give them achievement points so at least they get something after they restart.