Empire of Code is the first game for coders where you can win without any coding | Hacker News Reader

Empire of Code is the first game for coders where you can win without any coding

empireofcode.com

28 pointsoduvan23 comments

Discussed a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10583954.

I grow weary of all these "games for coders" because they end up just being algorithm optimization games. Why not a game where every week the API you code against changes in random, non-backwards-compatible ways and maybe you get advance warning and documentation and maybe you don't. And your code should randomly error or fail to deploy because some personnel are on vacation, or left to get new jobs and so on.

They already included that feature! It uses Python 3!

Sounds too much like work.

"Login to play"

Nahhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

If you want people to play your game, forcing them to sign up first isn't the best way to do it. Let me try it out, then maybe say that you need to sign up to go past the first level or save your progress.

You have to sign up so you can pay real money for virtual goods!

This is just a crap game where you can pay real money to speed up progress, probably vaguely similar to Clash of Clans.

Apparently the "innovation" is that you can solve simple programming problems (i.e. write algorithmic code that passes tests) instead of paying real money (not clear if it's only in some or all cases).

Avoid.

>This is just a crap game where you can pay real money

I can't find anything about in-game purchases. They also don't have a mobile version yet. What are your reasons to say all of this?

I played the game for a few minutes. I had the option of spending $99.99 to purchase a red lightning bolt thing.

lucky guy! :) You should buy it no matter what ;)

Huh, $99.99 for the bolt thing? The company looks legit, they announce a partnership with Jetbrains on their blog, for example.

http://www.checkio.org/blog/

Do you know some other places where you can buy BOLT for just $99.99 :)

Login and start the game, then click on the "+" buttons on the upper right corner next to the amount of resources you have.

Not only, my friend :)

You you can make your building better solving puzzles, you can use standard algorithms in battle, but you can also write your own algorithms

or... wait for it... steal algorithms in battles...

For me, it still doesn't get any better than http://robozzle.com/, but I have yet to try out Empire of Code.

I had a lot of fun with http://codecombat.com , I'll check that out too.

A bit off-tangent. Does anyone remember a really old game (probably pre-2000) where you are some dude stranded on a remote planet and you have these robots that you could code to do tasks (like mine, defend from alien attack?) I remember you are near your spaceship and you get a couple of the robots.

What's the point of "login with github" if you still ask for my email? Not interested...

Don't lose the best game ever just because of that :)

This uses Python 3 without mentioning it, so it's easy to write correct Python 2.7 code and have it judged wrong.

Agree!

Completely fails to load in IE?

JavaScript vs. Python, huh?

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