#codemancer

I decided to give “Codemancer” a try. A game that is aimed at children and youths (aged 6 to 12). It’s a story-based game with the goal of teaching you how to code. The game costs $10, but at the time of writing this, it’s free. It is also available on Steam, but not on sale there at the moment.

“Codemancer brings the mystery of magic and the exhilaration of learning to code together in a fantasy universe that uses spell casting as a way to teach and learn programming skills.”

The surrounding story is about a girl who starts her first day at a wizard school where she’s learning how to become a codemancer. There, she gets a familiar (a choice between a cat, a dog or a bird) which she’ll give commands to in order to move through the map made of hexagonal fields. This is done by selecting commands in advance from start to end. At some point, her father gets abducted and she has to go save him.

You start by entering simple commands like “jump”, “turn right”, “jump” to get where you want to go. You can also repeat sequences (“jump”, “turn right”, “jump”, “turn right”) or repeat a single command several times (“jump” x5). For me as an adult, it’s very easy, of course. And then there’s repeat inside another repeat. I’d describe it as teaching kids how coding algorithms work. The debugging part works because you can see your character and her familiar move while the sequence is running on the right side of the screen. So you get a visual feedback where the sequence isn’t working – e. g., the character is jumping outside of the map because you forgot to turn her right again before letting her jump. You can do runs of your commands whenever you wish as there is no failure when it’s not working. This is good because it saves children from becoming too frustrated and giving up.

I assume it’s too difficult for your average 6-year old. Then again, the repeat sequences aren’t needed. A kid can just use one command after the other: Jump, jump, turn right, turn right,… – with some help, this should also work with younger children then. So, no matter the kid’s age, even if they juse every command one after the other, they will succeed.

The story is very kid-friendly as the things they attack aren’t living beings, but rather inanimate objects conjured by other codemancers. This is said at the very beginning and the character expresses her joy as she can then smash them without a bad conscience.

Being a psychologist in the educational sector, I always love finding educational games that don’t look or feel like an educational game immediately… the kind that seems to be educational first, game second. Everything here voiced, so the kids can listen and don’t need to read. The voice-over is very well done and the main character is quite loveable. It may become a bit too repetitive at some point, but the story keeps the player engaged. It’s definitely a game I would recommend to families with children in the appropriate age… or even to adults. I played it, too, after all!

Time to face the wrath of Obelisk the Tor... wait... different kind of Obelisk, rising from the ground. Happy Tuesday everyone!

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I made some fun little animations for Codemancer tonight, this should give Aurora some fun puzzle to play with. Character animation by Patrick Beavers, the rest by yours truely.

Hope everyone is having a nice relaxing weekend. Cheers!

Lovely, ain't she? That's my sister. (The one on the left. The other one is her stage-sister. Like a Coraline critter, yes.)

Even before I started writing a single word for the Codemancer novel, I knew I wanted a heroine rather than a hero. But then I caught myself wondering: what would she be like? Mass media has popularized the idea of svelte, skinny people who are somehow disarmingly strong or competent. (Which is not to say they can't be, but sometimes it's just silly. Post-apocalyptic heroines cannot afford to be delicate. They have armies to lead, damn it.) The Atlantic's Julianne Ross sums it up here, really:

In Mortal Instruments, for example, Clary Frayis “delicate” and “slender,” with a small chest and “narrow hips.” Lena Duchannes, the most powerful “caster” (i.e., witch) in the Beautiful Creatures series, earned her nickname “Lena Beana” because her grandmother thought she was “skinny as a string bean.” We learn that the tenacious heroine of Blood Red Road (a best-selling “Mad Max for girls”) is “scrawny” before we even learn her name. And, of course, there’s The Hunger Games, which makes it clear that Katniss Everdeen is “smaller naturally,” even in comparison with the other members of her starving district. Some readers became so attached to the image of a short, emaciated girl claiming victory in the battle-royal arena that when Jennifer Lawrence was cast as Katniss, multiple critics complained that she was too “big-boned” for the part.

Needless to say, I didn't want another cat-hipped sylph introduced to the literary mix. I also didn't want to feature a very large girl, although that had nothing to do with pop-culture ideals and everything to do with what I personally had in mind: someone average. I wanted someone who was in between both extremes. I wanted someone who was athletic but not built exclusively out of sculpted muscles. I wanted someone with a softness to their faces and a cord of flesh around their waist, who could be strong and identifiable all at the same time.

Which is how I ended up drawing inspiration from my little sister. She's about five feet tall and she climbs up silk ropes attached to ceilings for fun. She does parkour, teaches people yoga, and still pigs out on chocolate. She's your every girl who went ahead and decided to make a career out of physical activity but could have just as easily went into something more cerebral. She looks like how I imagine our protagonist would look like in ten years, if she eventually came to make the same decisions that my sister did.

The other reason as to why my sister became a basis for the character is, I guess, this article from video game luminary Jenn Frank entitled Allow Natural Death. which is gorgeous and heart-breaking and the kind of writing that will stick with you forever. In it, she talks about Super Hexagon, her adoptive mother’s last days, and humanity’s complex relationship with death. And love letters that have nothing to do with romance, and everything with the raw, beating emotion that gives reason to our daily lives.

I often tell freelancers that every article they write should be a love letter to just one person: they ought to picture that person, maybe pine a little for her or his love, as they write directly to that person. The Creatures column, I’d written directly to my mother.

In many ways, The Missing Familiars is a love letter to my sister, a telegram to the girl she used to be. When she was the same age as the main character, she began dieting feverishly in a bid to look like everyone else. More than a decade later, she confessed that that was the year when her eating disorders began. We joke that it’s the reason that she is so darn short but the knowledge eats at me constantly. I was a confused teenager at the time. I wish I knew enough to have stopped her, to have helped her make the right choices there and then. But I didn’t and I can't change that.

I can, however, determine what the heroine of The Missing Familiars will be like and the kind of values that she might end up sharing with tweens who find themselves with a copy of the book. I can help draw the line and say, "You don't need to be a Victoria's Secret model to be most excellent at life." I can mix up the best parts of my only sibling with a dash of Codemancy, a handful of cautionary parables, and a string of poignant flaws before putting the results out in the world.

Because that's what making something means, isn't it? The ability to shape worlds, to create characters that fall outside of the status quo, and talk about important ideas. If I can't decide that she won't be just another Katniss Everdeen, I might as well go write another Twilight trilogy instead.

With Petrina, the star of The Missing Familiars, I want to show that the role of "hero" is not exclusive to men or petite waifs. It belongs to anyone, really. Of any shape or size. I mean, Petrina is far from little Miss Perfect. She has troubles with peer pressure, and problems distinguishing her desires from her need to fit in with the crowd. She is feisty and headstrong and self-centered in the way only teenagers can be. She treats her familiar abysmally. (What's a familiar and the heck is this Codemancy thing I keep talking about? Well, funny you should ask that...)

But she is also youth's unassailable certainty that life is everything you make of it and hope and unmolded clay that might one day be forged into something wonderful. She is strong but not sure, a little bit of faith and hormonal anxiety, and a total gelato addict. I can't change what my sister has gone through in life, but I can take everything that she has learned to make a character that might, just maybe, help someone figure out the same questions my sister had at that age.

My favorite book of 2012 was written for 10-year-olds.

Or, to be more specific, children that fall under the "middle grade" division.

Between you and I, a part of me is still standing around gawking at the idea, eyes owl-round with shock at what the rest of her has become. For years, I was one of those people, an elitist SFF reader who campaigned against the segregation between fiction for adults and reading material for teenagers. I didn't want adolescents to begin their literary habits with Twilight or Percy Jackson or any of the hundreds of The Hunger Games clones. I wanted them to be christened with the Laundry Files, Johannes Cabal, and Bel Dame Apocrypha.

But, then someone told me that Terry Prachett's Tiffany Aching books were intended for teenagers, and the foundation of my world gave away. I was reading, even delighting in something intended for precocious tweens. How did that even happen? The curiosity became academic. I started actively purchasing Young Adult books, just to see if I could maintain my antagonistic stance.

Two months and twenty books later later, I had the answer.

Sometimes.

I still dislike Percy Jackson, although that might have more to do with what it has done with Greek mythology than the actual writing. (Yes, Disney’s Hercules totally gets a nose crinkle.) The Divergent franchise still makes me cringe, and anything with a love triangle will still instantly make my hackles raise. But, YA contains some brilliant stuff and a surprising amount of contributions from the most unexpected sources.

Take Richard Kadrey, for example. Probably best known for the amazing Butcher Bird and his gritty Sandman Slim franchise, the author wrote a book called Dead Set sometime back, which is about a punk-loving teenage girl who goes into the Underworld in search of her father. It’s a more anaemic read compared to his other work but Dead Set makes up for it by addressing some complicated topics: self-harm, personal sacrifice, the physical death of one parent, and the slow, emotional death of another.

It’s easy to forget that YA titles don’t have to be stripped-down, sanitized version of books for adults. They can be feisty and terrifying. Lauren Beukes’ recently published Broken Monsters is ostensibly a book for adults, but it also includes a fascinating and somewhat uncomfortable take on adolescent life. Online predators? Harassment? Misdemeanor on Chatroulette? Ego-mottled school politics? The checkboxes are ticked here.

YA books have blunter narratives. Their ideas are written in block letters or carved into mile-high stone tablets. The prose is sharper, more biting, and less prone towards wasting time on graphic descriptions. But that doesn’t make them any less intelligent. More innocent, perhaps, but certainly not lacking in cleverness. They’re parables, modern-day fairy tales, the voices of the older generation looking to help the young traverse some dangerous territory. The best YA books are warnings, asking its readers to open their eyes and take stock of issues before they can turn into neuroses, or windows into a world that has only begun to become accessible.

Which is partially why I was so excited about running into Robert Lockhart from Important Little Games a few weeks after I hit that particular epiphany. He was looking for someone to write a companion novel for Codemancer, an edutainment game that is looking to inspire a love of programming in younger kids. Obviously, I applied. What was miraculous was, in spite of a rambly interview, he ended up saying, “Yes.”

There are a lot of things that I’m hoping to accomplish with the Codemancer novel, which has been tentatively codenamed “The Missing Familiars” for the time being. One of them is creating a book that is potentially appealing to both kids and adults. As I’ve mentioned earlier, my favorite title of 2014 is a book for middle-grade kids. It’s called A Face Like Glass, and it is magical.

The main character is a little girl named Neverfell, who finds herself somehow entangled in the world of Caverna, a subterranean kingdom ruled by dangerously smiling nobles and craftsmen gifted in the art of True Delicacies. Here, wines are predatory liquids capable of draining memories, cheeses can be turned into explosive devices, and perfumers are artisans who have their eyes ritualistically removed upon apprenticeship. Even more enchantingly, this is a world where no one is capable of developing expressions without help. The poor are given only a few faces to select from, while the rich are blessed with rich and various faces. It’s wild, weird, and it is all deliciously written.

Here, let me find you a few quotes:

“I know how it is," Madame Appeline said, narrowing her slanting eyes slightly over her ice-cream smile. "There is a feeling deep down inside you, isn’t there? All the time. It bothers you. You don’t really know what it is, or how to describe it. You do not have a Face for it. And so you scan all the Face catalogues, and ask for Faces for every birthday because perhaps, just perhaps, if you had the right Face, you might understand what you are feeling. You need to find that Face."

And

“At one o’clock, the ever-logical Right-Eye Grand Steward woke up to discover that during his sleep his left-eyed counterpart had executed three of his advisors for treason, ordered the creation of a new carp pool and banned limericks. Worse still, no progress had been made in tracking down the Kleptomancer, and of the two people believed to be his accomplices, both had been released from prison and one had been appointed food taster. Right-Eye was not amused. He had known for centuries that he could trust nobody but himself. Now he was seriously starting to wonder about himself.”

Lovely, isn’t it? Frances Hardinge’s writing is both extravagant yet simplistic, ruled by cunning phrases and earthy, vivid descriptions that demand the use of the imagination instead of a dictionary. An articulate tween could probably read her work, possibly with some guidance from a parent, but it is readable. I’m hoping that The Missing Familiars will be the same.

Stylistic stuff aside, we’ll also exploring a variety of thoughtful themes with The Missing Familiars, including bullying, broken families, societal manipulations, sexism, and some other ideas that I’m going to keep under my hat for the time being. And it won’t just be about that. The Missing Familiars will also be an outright adventure.

After setting a few ground rules, Rob was kind enough to let me go a little wild with the Codemancer universe, and the novel will go into detail about that. Are you curious about the logistics of actually owning a familiar? Have you ever wondered what would occur if a prey and predator species were to find themselves in the same room? If there are age limits or even laws against having certain animals in place? Have you contemplated if anyone would associate religious significance with the introduction of Codemancy? We’re going to check that out right here.

As technology flourishes games become things that are not only fun, but also can teach us how to learn. And now, a game promises to not only teach us the magic of programming.

(more…)

LAST CALL FOR FUNDING: Codemancer, Möira, and More

Gather around, everyone. I’ve got something incredible to tell you about.

Well, two incredible things.

The first is about Amplitude, the remake of the PS2 game that Harmonix was attempting to crowdfund. I brought it up last week as an example of a game that slips through the cracks of our guidelines of either being halfway funded, having a low goal, or having reached its initial goal. The game…