Market Research: Young Hacker's Primer

Pre-amble

I started to look at creating a demo game using the ManagedDreams Engine today. It's going pretty well. The plan is to create a single-player Campaign mode to get people in the zone, and a Group scenario mode, which will be the main focus of the final demo game.

It occurred to me that a well-made single-player campaign is a fluid, transparent tutorial. The player starts with a few simple possible actions and relatively trivial tasks. At the start he/she is quite happy to be able to easily kill monsters, at no threat to themselves.

Gradually, the campaign introduces more and more possibilities to the player, and the tasks become more complex and more challenging.

I couldn't help thinking: if a game can be a tutorial, could not a tutorial be a game?

And hence was born the idea for the Young Hacker's Primer

The Young Hacker's Primer

... is a self-contained LSL tutorial created with as its primary goal for it to be a fun game. The player would surely learn LSL as a useful side-effect but this would not be the primary focus.

The player would click, or open, the Primer to receive a task. To start with it would be something simple, like create an object that says "Hello Avatar".

The advantages/disadvantages of using LSL as the basis for a game are:

advantages:
- no gaming platform to write. LSL is already the platform!
- player gets something useful out of it that they can use outside of the game

disadvantages:
- need to have a way of checking whether tasks have been completed or not

Now, in previous RL tutorials-as-games that I have seen, the validation has been fairly inflexible. You basically have to present an exact copy of the script the validator is expecting. This is ok for exams and stuff, but it's not applicable for a game scenario.

In a game scenario, the rule is basically that the player achieves the goal using any means possible, and the Young Hacker's Primer would be no exception.

For example, for the trivial case of making an object say hello, it is simple to wait for an object to say hello and to verify that the object belongs to the player. More complicated tasks would introduce an element of speed into the task: make the object say hello 10 times in 2 seconds, to encourage the player to actually use a script for it. But if they don't, if they physically touch the object 10 times to do it, that is fine.

There is no such thing as exploitation in this game. Achieve the goal by any means possible.

Once a task has been completed, player gets an audiovisual reward (particles, chime) and the right to click the Primer to get the next task.

At the end of the Primer, player will be comfortable with many of the core aspects of real-life LSL programming.

Question

So, here is the question: would you be interested in using the primer? How much would it be worth to you? (L$ or USD) Be honest, both to yourself and to me. Bear in mind that what you say will dictate the price the Primer is sold for, but obviously a higher price increases the chances of the project being accepted.

To give an indication, bottom-line I would hope to make a total sales revenue of 100USD (L$150000) for a basic primer that covers the core LSL functionality and USD300-500 (L$450000 - L$750000) for a well-done Primer taking you to a good level in LSL.

If you are interested in purchasing the Primer, please indicate below, along with how much you would be prepared to pay for it.

If you like the idea of the Primer and just decided you will make one for free, please let me know! Please be honest both to me and to yourself about how much time you are prepared to dedicate to this. I think the Young Hacker's Primer would be a very interesting project for SL, and that it would be fun to do. If you will do it for free, so much the better!

I'm open to sponsorship. You could be Linden Labs or a private investor. You can contact me in-game or at [email]hughperkins@yahoo.com[/email] or by phone at +33 613361073 (3am to 2pm PST).

Azelda

As you may or may not know I was in the SL game business. I considered making a hacking game to mimic some web sites out there. For those that don't know there are some websites that are setup as a game to progress as far as you can. When you start it asks for a password, enter the correct password to get to the next level - a new password prompt. The ones I played with went from simple text entry, through java script, macromedia, java app, vb app, and I never got past the one after the vb app.

I had thought about following the same guidlines for a game in SL - to require a password or something to get to the next level. However the means are far more limited in SL then in the world as a whole (since SL is a subset of the world yada yada). So I never got anywhere.

This idea seems to be a better fitting application of a similar idea into SL. I wouldn't pay more than a 100 or 200L for an attempt at making it through the ranks, and I would probably expect a prize if I did beyond a nice particle effect. But I can already script so I may not be the prime audience.

Although I'm not willing to build the entire project myself, I would be willing to build a level or two or more. It should be fairly easy to make a standard level api so that you can have a seperate script for each level.

It's a cool idea, but are you saying you are hoping to make 750.000 L$ out of this?

(edit: )

Hmm judging from your other posts here, you actually might be hoping to make that kind of money

I don't know what to say... well I'll just say what pops into my mind:

-You're out of your mind
-No way
-You're doing this the wrong way
-SL is mainly for fun
-Don't try to sell 'systems' in SL, try selling fun, works better
-Get your feet on the ground
-Don't start project designed to make profit in SL, or at least try to HIDE it if you do
-you're out of your mind
-people who work on projects that are big enough to be interested in the thing you are selling, probably can make it themselfs, and they will only buy it if you make it very cheap...

I like the work you do on the MMORPG-kit etc (still want to see it in action) and I think you're a good scripter, but you really have to stop thinking you're going to be a SL millionaire by selling scripting-systems or what you call em. Let alone anyone paying US dollars to you for SL stuff.

You might want to look at the SecondLife economy when setting your income expectations. By my calculations, you're expecting a total income of between 3% and 7% of the world's monthly income.

What Mark said. EVERYTHING Mark said. Yes, all of it.

In the earlyish days of Unix, a system called "LEARN" was written that does much of what you are proposing, it also included lesson scripting and would adapt to the user's proficiency by chosing more difficult tasks for high "scorers" and lowering the difficulty for those who were having trouble. It was also relatively accepting of user variation in acheiving the goal.

It was clever, well-written, pedagocially savvy and no one *ever* used it.

You can find the docs at http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/v7vol2a.pdf . And yes, Kernighan and Lesk do note that Bell Labs staff used it, but it was not clear if it was of their own free choice.

Azelda...

Good God.

You are posibly the most INSANE person I have ever heard of.. and not in a good way.

300-500 USD? WTF!?

Besides, You arn't too clear on what itll do..

Are you trying to make a system that will emulate a "do" function and see if you can code a certain result?

If so, You'd have to have about 150 scripts to handle all of the functions.. No Joke. 16kb, Azelda.

If it will just listen for certain results from a box.. well, thats rather limited, isnt it? All you could have it do is listen for certain words.. and thats not too hard to reproduce, is it?


This, like ALL OF YOUR OTHER PROJECTS, is doomed.