Announcing: Code / Collision

When I was a kid, I wasn't allowed to play video games. That was the rule. I couldn't play them, unless I made them. And that's how I learned to code.

I made games in Basic, then QBasic, then Visual Basic, some C++, and then a whole lot in Flash & JavaScript.

The thing I loved about coding video games is it exposed me to so many challenges you don't typically see with application or web development. Applied physics, trig, collision detection. My favorite was building a computer player to be my opponent.

These days, as many enter development through boot camps, and self-guided course, they leap frog over the amazing world of game development and get right into building applications, missing out on some really interesting opportunities.

But it's hard to create games these days: Our expectations for what games need to be are much higher than when I was getting started. On top of that, the languages we use to code games are not what we'd use for application development. The barrier for entry has gotten higher.

That's why I made code / collision. I wanted to provide a simple way to get people exposed to game development. Instead of getting bogged down in building the engine, with code / collision you just focus on the unique challenge of representing a strategy in code. I like this because it's a lot less about algorithmic efficiency, and so much more about problem solving.


The idea with code / collision is simple: Get a bunch of coders together, pick one of the code collision games, give them an hour, a day, or a week to code their strategies and then pit them all together to see whose will win.

code / collision is free and open source on GitHub. I hope you'll check it out, and hope it helps you coding games!

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