Play a Ruby + AI Coding Game in Your Browser via Bloc

But as someone who knows other languages and doesn't know Ruby, it does a pretty poor job of teaching the language. Take, for example, level 3, where you need two if statements (check health, then check for an enemy): it took me ten minutes to realize that ruby uses 'elsif' instead of 'else if' or 'elif' because the error thrown by the in-browser compiler was vague at best ("Oops, looks like we found a syntax error in your code. Try again and click "Grade it!" does not exactly illuminate any issues.)

I echo other commenters re: animation but I think in terms of actual didactic potential you need to add more actual coding documentation so newbies aren't lost. Still, huge amount of potential and I'm excited to see this develop.

The directions (e.g. forward vs left) were a little confusing as you can't tell which way the character is facing at first. Not a problem after level 1 though.

I second gerggerg's suggestion of step-by-step animation, along with highlighting as it runs each line of code. That would really help drive home the point for non-coders.

Are you capturing incorrect responses to see what common sticking points are? For example, I thought .feel() returned a string at first before eventually having to look at the tip.

Awesome idea though! I've been working on something very similar that I hope to share soon.

hmmm.

Also, when you have a syntax error, you need to copy it to a file on your system and figure out where the error is because the game doesn't even tell you what line it's on, let alone what the error said.

edit: Also, "a" is an archer, but it's not in the legend so you can't know what it is until you die from it: https://skitch.com/llimllib/gsi36/ruby-warrior-beginner-bloc

  - The code box can't be resized.
  - You have to read the 'tip' every time. It contains core api and not just tips.
  - Some characters aren't in the map key (archer)
  - It's a little shy on instructions.

  - To see it run through your code in realtime with the healths and points displayed.

  * you face 'forward', which is to the right.
    .walk! or .walk!(:forward) is what you want until later.
  * you can feel walls: .feel.wall?
  * you can print: p "Feels: #{warrior.feel}"
  * add this to the bottom of your file to get .archer? and .wizard? methods on look:
    class RubyWarrior::Space
      def archer?
        self.unit.kind_of? RubyWarrior::Units::Archer
      end
      def wizard?
        self.unit.kind_of? RubyWarrior::Units::Wizard
      end
    end

It's beatable w/o hand-coding each action - I ended with a fairly-general setup that only took a couple changed lines to solve the last task (a should_shoot? method, basically). But the 'course' as a whole needs a LOT of work. And better documentation. And fixes for the missing methods. And a better progression - if you don't set up something fairly flexible early on, you'll be re-writing a lot each time; the steps don't encourage you to generalize very well. And / or hints as to how to design something good to do this - there are absolutely no suggestions, no learning, just 'tips' that tell you half the API available to you.

If anyone wants a cheat-sheet for my setup for the end: https://gist.github.com/1574167 though it was tweaked at each level slightly, and grew into that. Definitely not my best work, but it works.

I love the idea though. If someone would be interested on working(for fun and as a learning experience) on something like this with html5 canvas and some graphics and all with a Ruby or Python back-end, tell me :D

I like the concept of in-browser coding as it removes the set-up barrier for noobs like myself, who struggled with setting up Python on Windows!

It would be great if there are better instructions as to what one needs to do. The tips aren't really tips when the info provided are essential to progress. It's pretty daunting for a beginner to go through the github page when I only need a couple of lines on the key need-to-knows for that particular level.

I echo gerggerg and trun's suggestion of step-by-step animation as the output failures leaves me none the wiser as to what went wrong as it's gibberish to me just now.

I don't know if it's just under heavy load every time I try to use it (admittedly only when it's on the front page of Hacker News, but it's seemingly always on the front page) or if I'm doing something wrong. Love the site, hate the performance.

  class RubyWarrior::Space
    def archer?
      self.unit.kind_of? RubyWarrior::Units::Archer
    end
  end

Some better error reporting, even providing the interpreter in JS (as suggested by another commenter), would allow people to run the app offline without leaving their browsers. Having the ability to install the gem is great, but I would say the browser opens it up to people who might not want to - or can't - do that.

Finally, the layout of the page means you have to keep scrolling up and down to refer to the level details and get back to the editor. There's a lot of horizontal space wasted with the fixed-width layout, when it could be used to present the level details and the editor side-by-side (thus allowing the editor to assume the full height of the browser).

This could be a really good tutorial with a bit more polish :) if I understood it all and knew Ruby well enough I'd gladly contribute.

  class Player
    def play_turn(warrior)
      warrior.walk!(:right)
    end
  end

This is counter-intuitive, because the exit is to the right of the warrior. I can't endure another N levels of nonintuitive frustration, sorry.

Damn you archer!

player.rb:5:in `play_turn': undefined method `health' for #<RubyWarrior::Turn:...> (NoMethodError)

Not sure if it's supposed to be added in later levels or what, but it's a bit frustrating. This looks really fun.

Don't take it too harshly, I definitely like what you are trying to do with the service and I'm interested to see how your classes evolve.