You might have heard about ScalaQuest earlier this week. It started with two Scala community heroes looking to make learning Scala more fun. So, they did it with a game.
ScalaQuest takes place in DataLand, a place where the land produces data, and its inhabitants harvest that data to survive. As we in Lightbend loved the idea, I was eager to talk to Alejandro Lujan, one of the game's creators, in a short interview.
As a Senior Software Developer & Trainer, Alejandro Lujan splits his time between architecting and building software, and coaching others on how to effectively use the Lightbend Reactive Platform. He has a strong passion for teaching, and is one of the few certified Lightbend trainers in Scala, Akka and Play. Over the last 4 years, he has taught over a thousand people from a variety of companies, ranging from startups like Hootsuite and large corporations like Intel and IBM. Alejandro has also created strong connections with many experts involved in building and supporting these platforms.
From a young age, I recognized the incredible power games have for creating immersive experiences, and have dreamed of leveraging this for learning. Personally, the biggest push I had as a kid for learning English was playing The Legend of Zelda - learning was just part of the experience, it did not feel like work and it was never boring. I've been looking for the opportunity to make an educational game for years, and I believe I finally found a real need for it in our developer community.
The backend of the game is - of course - written in Scala. We have a Play application serving content and processing large challenges that need to be compiled and tested on the server side. We will soon be integrating with Scastie for some of the heavy lifting. The frontend is a Javascript application written atop Phaser, an engine for building browser games. The most challenging aspect of the game - and the most important for the game experience - is integrating learning and practicing code within the game. We don't want to write a game that happens to have arbitrary code writing sections within it. We don't want two separate experiences - the game and the writing code. We're building a game where the code challenges are very much tied to the story and the virtual environment of the game. Creating this embedded experience is difficult, but we think we have good ideas on how to make this happen.
Users will be able to experience the first couple levels for free, but beyond that the game will be subscription-based. A subscription gives you access to the whole game, and our plan is to release one level per month. Also, you can't have games without easter eggs, so there's that :)
Thank you for the quick interview, Alejandro! And now it is on you, dear reader to go to Kickstarter and support them!
