Code Hero is on FOX TV! Check out Alex Peake at KTXL FOX 40. Alex announced that Primer Labs is now bringing code literacy into schools using Code Hero, a game that teaches you how to make games.
Players learn programming with a code ray that shoots Javascript. Anyone who enjoys games can now become an entrepreneur by making games and apps!
Code Hero is exhibiting at PAX East in Boston Friday April 5-7!
The Primer team is so busy making Code Hero and growing rapidly that we barely have time to update the site with news!
See Us At PAX East
We're coming to PAX East and we'll have more details up soon about our booth space in the Kickstarter Pavilion in Room 103.
Code Hero's Kickstarter Success Continues Via Our Store
Thank you everyone who supported us and pledged! People can continue to buy the game with the same pledge levels via our online store. For a limited time you can still get the shirts and all the rewards we offered via Kickstarter!
Code Hero's Internship And Training Program Begins Soon
Huge thanks to everyone who supported us at the trainee and intern levels! We're working hard to roll out our educational and collaborative infrastructure so that when internship starts we have a great system to facilitate your mentoring and teamwork. Thanks for your patience as our web team gets this online social layer built in parallel with the dev team's work on the 3D Unity gameplay itself.
Code Hero Is Coming To Schools
We're about to make a big announcement about the first school to adopt Code Hero during PAX East during a special event April 10th at a school in the Boston area. Once that launches we'll be in touch with all the schools who've pledged and inquired to adopt the Code School platform to begin consulting with your faculty to adapt the program to your school's needs.
The Code Hero Team Was at TED, BIL, GDC & SXSW
The Code Hero team participated in 4 conferences in a row immediately following our Kickstarter. We've begun lots of terrific collaborations with partners who want to help Code Hero change the world by making code the new literacy. We'll be announcing these developments as they launch for months to come!
Code Hero is now at IGN!
We've mobed into the Indie Open House incubator program at IGN's offices in San Francisco! This is a terrific program and we've been amazed at all the cool gaming culture at IGN and the creativity of our fellow Indie Open Housers. We'll have a video episode soon to show you what this amazing place looks like!
Thank you for your support in our epicly successful Kickstarter! You can now buy Code Hero directly from our store. It works very similarly to the Kickstarter pledge levels and can get the same rewards!
Code Hero's Kickstarter Victory Party is at 2169 Mission St., San Francisco!
We'll be doing a countdown at 11PM tonight!
We're doing a final push to reach $200K so we can release Code Hero as an MMO Multiverse with multiplayer cooperative coding collaboration for content creation and competitive combat challenges with code or be coded codefoo battles.
We're also working to expand Code Hero to teach Linux running inside in-game Virtual Machines you can interact with in the 3D game world.
This will let players not just program computers but also build their operating systems from the kernal up! The more we raise before midnight, the more we can accomplish in the days ahead!
We're releasing tonight at midnight an edition of the game with Minecraft creator Jeb in it! It is officially blessed by Mojang.
Jeb will talk about how he became a game developer, how he came to Mojang to work on Minecraft and what his dream hack and how it would amaze him if the player could take on this game development challenge and be the first to prove that you belong on the Real Artists Ship!
Spread the word on Twitter and Facebook and by Facebook and face-to-face so we can reach $200K this midnight and shape the future of the planet together!
Code Hero is a game that teaches you how to make games with a code gun that shoots Javascript in Unity 3D!
To make learning programming playable for all, we need your support to fund our Kickstarter and help spread the word. You get to play the beta now!
UPDATE: Congratulations to Tim Schafer for raising over $2 million! UPDATE: We've been BoingBoinged! UPDATE: Unity CEO David Helgason donated $1337 spread the word!
Code's inventor Ada Lovelace teaches you Javascript
Everyone Who Pledges Gets the Game Beta
When you pledge, you get immediate access to create your account and download the Code Hero game beta. You can try it today and tell your friends to pledge to get their accounts and help fund the development of the full game. Start playing and learning. You'lll get the latest each time new versions are released with improvements that your pledge helps fund!
This is your code gun! Shoot code to execute it on the target on impact. Copy, tweak and write code to alter the 3D world from the inside out.
To move a platform down, shoot hitObject.transform.position.y-=2;
Enter the World of Code as a Primer Labs Game Tester and enroll in the mysterious Gamebridge Unityversity to learn enough to earn entry into the Humantheon Hall of Code Heroes!
Master the secrets of Codefoo to defeat the devious coding challenges of the FizzBosses
FizzBoss is the first test of your code knowledge combining Javascript and Unity game programming that you learn.
ShipBoss ultimately challenges you to make a game of your own to earn a place as a Shipped Officer on the Real Artists Ship!
JobBoss tests your ability to do advanced challenges that could get you job interviews with top game companies!
Master the Unity3D game engine from the inside out to make games of your own and master the full stack to become the next code hero!
What you learn to make with Unity
The Unity game engine that Code Hero teaches you how to code in is the ultimate indie game development powerhouse. You can use Javascript, C#, and Python-like Boo to write games that run on everything: Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, XBox 360, Playstation 3, Wii, Web player, Flash, Native Client... You can put what you make into the App Stores and have your creations for sale to start your own indie game company! Master the Unity3D game engine from the inside out to make games of your own and become the next code hero!
Who We Are
I'm Alex Peake the founder of Primer Labs and I've spent the last year building Code Hero as an indie game with the Primer Labs team so you could play it. I've taken it as far as I can on my own and I need your help to make Code Hero the game that can turn you into a game programmer. i have some of the most talented people in the world ready to work on this to take it way beyond what I could do by myself.
Our Challenge To You: Kickstart Your Game Making!
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!
Testers Trying Code Hero
Here are two of our first testers to try the beta in their own words:
If Minecraft-style sandbox creativity and Portal-style puzzle learning sounds like fun, you'll like Code Hero!
Alex's talk at Open Science Summit
One of the worst investment decisions in human history was cutting funding to the inventors of computers, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. Computers turned out to be a pretty keen idea after all, yet less than 1% of humans can code.
Giving everyone the gift of code literacy is the first step towards investing in our creativity and setting ourselves free to invent the future!
Alex at Humanity+ @Caltech:
As we make game AIs to be our machine mentors teaching us to make better game AIs, what happens when we make machines that make us make them make us into them?
With your support, we can make the ultimate video game that teaches you how to make video games so everyone can master code literacy and code the games we wish to see in the world!
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!
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!
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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!
"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!
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!
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!
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 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:
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.
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!
Let us knowif you'll be in Toronto to collaborate esp. game developers & hackers
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 Beta launched at MineCon as exhibitors in the Indy Showcase Notch generously invited to participate. 
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 
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 
Ilya Zhitomirsky was a cofounder of the freedom-championing social network 
