Learning VIM while playing a game
vim-adventures.com
vim-adventures.com
It's a pity that the project's state is totally unclear (at least to me, a casual visitor). Is it meant to become a community project? Is it a demo of something that will be sold in the future? The explaining text behind the "Unlock Levels" button adds even more confusion:
> Additional levels are currently being developed for you to play and enjoy. The 3rd level will be available for FREE only for players who sign up for my email list. Sign up now! You'll be notified as soon as the level is up. The level won't be available for unregistered users.
On the one hand, it sounds as if it is free, with some "forcing" to make more users join the project mailing list. On the other hand, this is totally discouraging contributions (because you aren't allowed to see the work-in-progress version), so maybe it's meant to become for-sale in the future.
I'd love to see it developing either way (although I think the community way is the more appropriate for this project). But as of now, it seems to unify the disadvantages of both worlds: Advertising the mailing list in a way that appeals neither to people who are willing to pay (as there's no clear pricing plan), nor to people interested in contributing (as it seems to more about announcements/"newsletters" than about how to improve and to help).
Only it should be mentioned clearly.
If you advertise your project by stating you are convinced of the "power of Open Source", but don't make use of that "power", how much credible is that?
No matter if you find this argument convincing or not, it has nothing to do with the difference between Open Source and Free Software. It's just about adverticing a proprietary project with "power of Open Source" versus advertising it with, say, "power of Vim".
He's not, indeed, but that's why the GFDL was created. [1]
Interestingly, the GFDL is designed to be appealing to commercial publishers. [2]
However, I'm sure the same people will happily spend $100 for a book that teaches some open-source tool. Or at least they would never complain that there's a price for it.
Why?
At the moment we seem stuck in the middle of this transition and you either pay for a locked down copy or you get the Free copy for free. But Kickstarter seems like it's getting mainstream so the concept of paying in advance for something that is built to the specifications of the user may at last become common in software.
Many people believe [...] that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible — just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding. Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can.
In other words, it is important to distinguish paid software from proprietary software, otherwise the situation and arguments become confusing, indeed.
It is not free.
However when I try to sign up a second time a minute later with the same address, it reports "Email address is already on the list".
I found it particularly clever how the game forces you to use better navigation, by allowing you to skip over rocks that way.
Also, teaching capital HJKL early on seems like a good way to make it through the maze more easily; hitting the same key repeatedly (or rather, leaning on it until hitting a wall) seems like a bad habit to teach.
The message reads "Remember: these are not words"... so how do I get in there? Can that part of the game not be solved?
I've tried Shift-B, ^ etc. Is anyone else able to get into there?
Aside from that, it was not immediately obvious what W and B did, though a few seconds of playing around and it made sense. (That is about how far I got before it died the second time)
However, I can't input my email.. it has more than 30 chars. As per source:
<li><input id="email" name="email" maxlength="30" type="text" placeholder="Email Address" /></li>
It's awfully slow and thus unplayable. :(
I wanted to just create a program that was simply a layer between the terminal and vim, so all the power of vim was automatically available. The game was going to involve manipulating the environment (made of text) to different goals. I had all sorts of minigames in my head. Unfortunately, way too ambitious, and I never even properly started it. This makes me really want to though, if only I had more time..
I'm using a Macbook Air with Mac OS X Lion and Google Chrome and the gameplay is very smooth.
The game looks fine! I already see how my kids will learn vim :)
This is core problem with learning VIM, many people are off-put by VIMs complexity.
I think this game does a great job of letting the player explore vim commands, while complete objectives that are common to many video games.
What makes this game great isn't the fact that it's a video game that lets you learn VIM as you play. It's that it simply incorporates VIM commands into a game that could appear on any popular flash game site.
Very well done, keep up the good work.
The email address box however didn't show my email as I typed it in
That'd be considered 'wrong' or missing out. Which the game tries to correct. Supposedly later levels will teach you about vim 'words' and you'll combine hjkl with lots of other commands. You cannot do that the way you use the software. How's that 'lame'?
And what kind of an attitude is this if you click on a game that is supposed to teach you about vim and complain that it's forcing you to learn something right afterwards?
That's why it's lame. You most certainly CAN. I don't care that other functions combine with hjkl in vim. They're useful but using hjkl for left/right/up/down is annoying and the restriction in this "tutorial" makes it that much worse.
It's like cheating and looking at your hands when learning to type. You'll never really learn to type properly and it slows you down a lot. Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and do it right. I wouldn't be able to hit 80 WPM if I had to stare at my hands.
it's an interesting project none the less.
http://www.catonmat.net/images/why-vim-uses-hjkl/lsi-adm-3a....
http://www.catonmat.net/images/why-vim-uses-hjkl/adm-3a-hjkl...