Greetings Wizard! CodeCombat: Slay Ogres, Learn to Code Welcome to the first CodeCombat update! We will be sending these out from time to time to let you know about the latest and greatest on our site. You can also keep abreast of news and goings on through our blog, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Google+. To get in touch with us and the rest of the community, join us in our Hipchat chatroom or Discourse forum.



Now on to the news! We have a bundle of it for you. Video: New Art We work with some very talented artists at RetroStyle Games who put together a trailer for the game and the new sprite art we’re adding soon. Check out their amazing work:

Help Build the CodeCombat Community! CodeCombat is really all about the community, which is why we’ve launched our /contribute page, which details various ways to join in building the best programming game there ever was. You can sign up as one or more of the following character classes: Archmage - program on the site itself as we open source it

Artisan - build levels with the brand new Level Editor

Adventurer - playtest new levels and provide valuable feedback to Artisans

Scribe - write and curate reference material on topics being taught

Diplomat - translate character dialogue into other languages

Ambassador - assist other players on the site, in and out of game

Counselor - let us pick your brain for expertise to make CodeCombat great We look forward to building a vibrant, thriving community around CodeCombat. With your help we can spread the joy of coding and make a great place for programmers of all stripes to come and have fun. New Levels Zone of Danger Target the Ogres swarming into range. Play Now! Emphasis on Aim Choose your targets carefully. Play Now! Molotov Medic Tharin must play support in this dungeon battle. Play Now! Extra Extrapolation Predict your target's position - by player Sootn. Play Now! The Right Route Strike at the weakest point - by player Aftermath. Play Now! More Servers, More Power If you’ve been getting errors on CodeCombat.com, that’s because our tiny little server was struggling under the hug of death from several large news aggregators the past week. What we’ve learned is that people really like playing CodeCombat and it’s essential that we provide a better hosting experience. To meet demand, we have migrated to a cluster of much more powerful servers which should be able to handle the influx. So hit us with your best shot, we’re ready for you now! CodeCombat should now be able to run as quickly as your internet connection can handle. We want to give a special shoutout to Michael Schmatz, who was instrumental in putting together our AWS server array. Multiplayer and Code Persistence Are Back

When we went down under the combined might of reddit, Hacker News, wykop.pl, neoteo.com, Twitter, and everyone on Brazilian Facebook, we had to turn off code persistence and multiplayer to keep (kind of) afloat. With our new AWS setup and the Firebase real-time backend, both are back on and better than ever. You can use the multiplayer tab to invite friends into co-op mode with you, and you can leave and come back to your code just as you left it. New Forum We launched a new forum at http://discourse.codecombat.com and have many interesting discussions and user-created levels going on there right now, so join in! Upcoming Features and Content Our goal is to deliver new content every week, but we’re also hard at work on improving the site features and general stability. In the coming weeks we’re planning to publish many new levels in the newbie campaign, improve the usability of the level editor, create a sprite art editor, flesh out the co-op and head-to-head multiplayer, and much more.

Thanks for your support and excitement. We can’t wait to keep building with you!



Sincerely, George, Nick, and Scott CodeCombat Founders