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Friday, August 16, 2013

Beta Preview

I just finished trying out the beta preview. I'm going to explain my experience and compare it to the alpha.

In the alpha releases, there was this entire world called Gamebridge. It was like the Hogwarts equivalent to coding, as the Ada Lovelace AI explained. There were different buildings and rooms that you individually chose to visit. For instance, there was a place to go learn Javascript and another area for Unityscript.

Instead, the beta preview throws you into a new Unity tutorial that teaches you to use the editor controls to move and resize game objects, using them to make it from one side of the room to the other with each lesson. An achievement is unlocked with each successful crossing. It's reminiscent to the old Unityscript platform level of the alphas. At the end, you use all the combined skills to reach three gold stars in different locations.

After that, you are brought into a redone version of the Javascript tutorial. It's much the same, although it tosses off the random show-off cube blast and trades sitting in one room for the entire thing for breaking it up into separate rooms for each lesson. Also unlike the alpha, at least if I recall correctly, it instead encourages you to execute code in the editing screen as opposed to exiting and shooting at the wall-mounted console window.

When you complete that, you are tossed back to where you began, to start over. So that's basically it.

I am left wondering what happened to the entire Gamebridge campus? Perhaps it will still exist and this preview is just that, a showing of a couple areas that are polished off enough for Mr. Peake to be confident enough to share them.

There's still some bugs and I feel the transitioning between topics (especially for the Javascript tutorials) needs some work, but it does feel like an improvement. Ada also didn't any immersion-breaking phrases that seemed out of character for her, like her use of "owned" so easily in the alpha.

There's no telling how much of the alpha will be kept or tossed, with none of it completely intact for this beta preview. Without any further details on what's happening from Mr. Peake, we don't really know how much of the game there really is and what will come. Let's hope he gives an update soon, one with some real details.

Update: Recently added to the Primer Labs' site:
It has been a while since our last update and some were concerned when our site went down but we're back online with a beta preview release to show you some of the levels in the upcoming Code Hero Beta. We've been working hard on getting the game ready, and we need to work just as hard on communicating better with our backers. We're now resuming weekly updates. You'll hear from us regularly about the progress of the beta and we want to hear from you about what you think of the new game levels.
And there's an update on it on Kickstarter.

2 comments:

  1. I'm sure you are aware that there isn't a Code Hero wikipedia page. You should take a crack at starting one, you've certainly done a lot of research to support the task....

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  2. You know what screw it, Xero if you want some history dating back further than anyone else can give you on code hero and Alex Peake lets chat PM me any time.

    ReplyDelete