More than a hundred people clicked through to the CodeCraft tutorial over the last few days, which is a nice start. I don’t have any other statistics though, so I have very little visibility into how many of those are actually using CodeCraft, or don’t know/like Scala/Java, or think the idea or implementation suck, or don’t have the time/patience to perform all of the setup and go thought the tutorial. If you have any thoughts on CodeCraft, do share them, it really helps me figure what I need to be working on!
Looking forward, I think at this stage there is not much point to improve the actual game. My main focus will now shift to growing the user base and gaining more insight into what people are looking for. I have two main projects to that effect: The first is to set up an actual website which can serve as a platform to promote CodeCraft and gather some statistics. The second one is to use Scala.js to create an interactive Javascript version of the game that runs right in your browser. This will eliminate the need to perform any setup and make CodeCraft accessible to a much larger audience. As always, I will keep you informed of any progress.
You should do a screencast showing a walkthrough of the setup and gameplay and upload it to YouTube. I’m not a Scala/Java guy so I’m waiting for this to get more mature with support for other languages, but keeping my eye on the project. It’s a cool idea.
Minimizing the barriers to entry is probably the most important first step.
I like the screencast idea, I hadn’t thought of that before! I also agree about minimising barriers to entry, that is one of the main goals for the javascript/webgl port that I’m working on right now.