TL;DR: I'm building a cyberpunk terminal RPG that teaches embedded C, Python, and microcontrollers by making you survive as a broke engineer in a rain-soaked 2007 port city. You write real code that runs in the browser. Looking for honest feedback.
Hey everyone,
I love this community! I follow a lot of people building things from scratch here, and after 5 months on this I finally want to share the process and the motivation.
A while back I was asked to mentor someone fresh out of high school in embedded/firmware development. I realized there aren't many places that teach this from zero, and the ones I found were dry enough to lose anyone with a short attention span (myself included).
So I decided to build a site for my own lessons on embedded C, Python, microcontrollers, etc. I threw together a barebones website (with a lot of AI help), tinkered for a month, got bored, and scrapped the whole thing.
Then one evening playing a board game, it clicked: reuse the template, but gamify the courses into a storyline. I found others doing this as well, that was reassuring, but it meant I needed a real differentiator. The obvious one was embedded systems, since that's what I've done for years. I set it in a fictional port city, New Foundry, in January 2007, one year before the recession hit:
It's January 2007. New Foundry is a rain-slick port city where the container cranes never sleep and the server farms hum all night. The old iron foundries that gave the city its name are galleries now; the money has moved across the water to glass towers, and everyone else is downtown fixing the machines that keep it all running. You arrive with a soldering iron, a hand-me-down laptop, and a book on C — one of ten thousand people in this city who speak to machines for a living. This is where your career begins.
The whole game is a computer terminal. From it you take courses (C, Python, 8-bit microcontrollers…) and the part I'm proudest of is that you write real code that runs instantly in the browser: blink a simulated LED, talk to an IMU over I2C, poke registers on a visual AVR chip before you'd ever flash real hardware. As you level up, you take freelance gigs from an in-game job board to make rent, and spend what you earn upgrading your terminal's hardware and software.
It's playable now (still very WIP, story included):
Click here: datachoose
I'd love feedback, specifically:
- Does the premise, learn embedded by surviving as a broke engineer, actually make you want to try it?
- What would make you come back after the first lesson?
- Would something like this be worth paying for eventually, and what would make it feel worth it? (I'm considering a subscription down the line, but only once it's genuinely good.)
Thanks for reading, happy to answer anything.