I think that if you have at least a video of real game-play, your poised to take donations like this. If you have something users can download and play with, even if it's unstable, then you could definitely solicit. But a nice website and a vague concept is not good enough. I mean, in terms of specifics all we get is:
"You've just landed on an island. Deploy your soldiers and decide when and how to attack to defeat your opponents.
Code your strategy in Python or Javascript (more languages coming up!) and prove your skill in a revolutionary programming competition."
There is a good discussion of this on progit [1]. The general consensus was there have/are lots of coding games, so this is not revolutionary, and the product is currently vaporware for a startup contest.
This is the quickest way to kill my interest in a game. I don't want exclusive items/features/modes/whatever the fuck you are selling. I want everyone who purchases the game, now and forever, to get an identical product.
Early bird discounts are fine, but everything else ruins the experience for me.
For reference, this is an output of the Stanford startup engineering course (which I also signed up for after it hit the HN front page)
In the homework, this is what they mention the goal of the 'bitstarter' page to be:
"Choose a project which you can get to a crowdfunder
People in the class have widely varying backgrounds, ranging from relative neophytes to fairly advanced students. Your goal is to figure out a final project that you can get to the level of a reasonable crowdfunding site. This can mean anything from verbal description and mockups to fully working code, or anything in between: whatever is necessary to make the sale and prove that you have a market. Note that you have control over who's seeing the crowdfunder (e.g. the people in your email list or social circle), so you are also determining the difficulty of the sale itself by choosing the market and the initial crowdfunding audience. Note also that you can just ask for someone to share your content on social media rather than pay you real money for a preorder. Open source projects are ok as well, not just for-profit businesses. The main guideline is to set your success bar at the point that it'll be an achievable challenge for you. That might be a target of $100 or it might be $100,000."
I took this class in person back in the winter. I was under the impression that this class would help me hone my web dev skills a bit, but it really turned out to be very focused on business dev.
That said, Balaji provided some excellent advice, and the course itself is great for anyone interested in the startup process. Just don't expect to come out of the class as some web dev master.
I've been hoping for a game like this for a long time. That said, I'm not going to support it until they demonstrate how it's going to be played. The problem is that programming is a challenging—and often frustrating—experience, and building it into a game in a way that is educational and enjoyable is not easy. Heck—even Notch said he couldn't figure out how to build programming into 0x10c in a way that worked.
This looks pretty interesting. My friends and I are working on a game in a similar vein to this one (teaching programming through gameplay) however it is a 2D platform game. If you like this sort of stuff check the project I'm working on at www.betathegame.com .
We have done workshops with kids and have footage although we aren't releasing playable demo's just yet. We are closing in on completion. No need for donations but if you like what we're doing please share!
There are loads of different ways to sandbox a given process. If they're feeling particularly paranoid/lazy running each match in an ephemeral VM would be one way. Here's a SO question with more: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4249063/how-can-i-run-an-...
"You've just landed on an island. Deploy your soldiers and decide when and how to attack to defeat your opponents. Code your strategy in Python or Javascript (more languages coming up!) and prove your skill in a revolutionary programming competition."
Yeah, no.