Games and Learning

CodeSpells is a 3D RPG that teaches coding by using magic spells to solve problems and it’s about to get its own mystical overhaul thanks to a successful funding campaign on Kickstarter.

The development not only shows how CodeSpells has built a solid following, but also highlights the growing push to expose children to the power of coding.

CodeSpells raised three-times its target amount in a Kickstarter campaign earlier this fall.

The game grew out of a research project at University of California, San Diego, by Stephen Foster, a PhD student researching HCI (Human Computer Interaction), and Sarah Esper, who recently completed her PhD from UC San Diego in Computer Science with a focus on Computer Science Education and HCI.

“We were broadly testing to see how games would teach coding, but in particular we were interested in this metaphor of magic, that coding could be framed in the game world as magic. That is something that I think is unique – I haven’t come across another game that has done that. It tends to be games that frame coding as coding – coding robots or computers – something that you would expect to be coded. There is no metaphor applied to the process,” Foster said.

Foster and Esper have published several papers on the academic benefits of CodeSpells, documenting examples of students solving programming problems during gameplay and other positive behaviors. Although they didn’t design the game with a target age group in mind in order to keep it broadly applicable, most of their testing and research was focused in the middle school range.

Their research came back with one key message: students can be taught the fundamentals of coding and they can have fun doing it.

Making it a Business

During this time, Foster, Esper, and Lindsey Handley, a Biochemistry PhD candidate in San Diego, teamed up to form ThoughtSTEM, a tutoring business that teaches coding in after-school programs.

But this team also had plans for CodeSpells.

“Earlier this year we were accepted into a National Science Foundation-run accelerator program, specifically designed for researchers to take their work to the public. It tries to help provide business skills and market testing,” Foster said.

Both Foster and Esper were recipients of National Science Foundation fellowships, which gave them the ability to explore what they wanted for their research, and build the early versions of the game. The NSF accelerator then provided additional funding that allowed them to do some marketing and further infrastructure work. They also used money coming in through the tutoring business to help build out the game.

Taking it to Consumers via Crowdfunding

Still they had bigger aspirations for the coding game and turned to the public to see if there might be support for their idea.

And, like magic, there was.

Their initial ask of $50,000 was slated to build out a new version of the game with more elements in the game’s world.

But the campaign was well received. They more than tripled their goal.

The additional funds will allow them to add more complex elements to the game, especially because the team made some critical creative decisions that kept development costs down.

“One thing that won’t be in the game is a storyline, for example, or characters that talk to you, at least not yet, because those require a high level of design effort,” Foster said.

Instead, said Foster, they focused on things they could accomplish with a small team. The game will have a large expansive world, but it will be procedurally generated, not crafted by hand. And it will be multiplayer, but it won’t be a centralized multiplayer game like World of Warcraft.

“Minecraft is our model in terms of the way the game functions – not the art or mechanics per se, but it does some things that are really cool, in that it’s all procedurally generated and the multiplayer is very grassroots,” he said, adding that anyone can start up a server and invite their friends to it.

The next version of the game will not only get an artistic overhaul, but a bigger world with more complex ‘spells’ to explore in game play, as well as multiplayer options. It will also include a simpler coding language to make the game more accessible.

“When it was a research project, the goals were different. We wanted to be able to show what a cool educational tool it was and one of the ways we did that was to show that it could teach Java, which is a difficult programming language, and not one that is easy for beginners to pick up,” Foster said. “We’ve changed that entirely so that it is now as easy to pick up and play by as many people as possible, so instead of Java, we’re now using Blockly, a drag and drop programming language.”

In the first prototype, the world was smaller and there were characters you interacted with. The early magic system was very rudimentary before. You had the power to lift things up and catch things on fire, but now you can do a lot more. Our programmer is very interested in physical systems and simulating physics and there are lots of ways to apply forces to things to get objects to do interesting things.

Stephen Foster, CodeSpells

This wasn’t Foster’s first time using Kickstarter. He had done a small-scale campaign through ThoughtSTEM to support a project for a group of students who had an idea to make laser tag devices, which was also successfully funded. While that campaign helped in understanding the basics of how to run a Kickstarter project, Foster believes the critical key to the success of the CodeSpells project was being featured as a “Staff Pick” on Kickstarter, and media pickup from sites like TechCrunch and Wired. (We’ll link to these stories)

Because Foster and his co-founders are still students at UCSD, they are able to leverage their connection to the university, and the media relations department has been helpful in getting their story out.

Even with the help, Foster is pleased with the funding they received on Kickstarter. “It’s working out perfectly and better than we expected. All we were expecting was $50,000. We have a lot more breathing room.”

CodeSpells will be available to play soon. It was greenlit on STEAM early into the Kickstarter campaign and the alpha is planned for a release on STEAM next month.

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For information on how the CodeSpells team prepped and ran their Kickstarter campaign, check out this post-mortem written for Gamasutra by ThoughtSTEM’s Lindsey Handley, who managed the Kickstarter campaign.