Unfortunately, the Wizardry professor is on a temporary leave of absence to another dimension, so we are not able to provide any spell books at this time. Please use the magic of the Web to learn all that you can in the meantime.

I can’t help but notice the startling similarities between you and your wife & myself and my wife. You’ve got many years of experience on us granted as we’re still somewhat newlyweds… I’ve been playing and designing games since the near end of the Atari’s popularity, before the NES came out (not always video games) but with all these advancements, it’s difficult trying to catch up, let alone publish a single game without help. Now it seems you need a massive team to get a game out to compete with everyone else (at least if you are wanting to make a massive game like WoW). And then there’s my wife with her photography hobby and her skills with photoshop as well.

I’m thinking of learning JavaScript now so I can get some of my smaller games out at least. I just got my first smartphone and I think I could make a reasonable start making games for that kind of platform. Of course that will take time too. But I taught myself BASIC while I was still in elementary school and later got a good introduction to C++ in, so I think I’ll be alright.

I’m not sure what you totally intend for version 3.0 of the school, but if you need a hand, someone to help moderate the forums to clean up spam, some graphic design for the refurbished site, a 3d model of the school based off the map given, or for some reason need a good amateur voice actor (been doing a hero’s voice for 4-5 years now), I can lend a hand there.

Anyways, good luck with everything!

As for the school closing, students (and instructors, for that matter) have at least three choices. They can grumble and use their school time to play more Angry Birds, they can spend more time in the “real world” away from their computers, or they can resolve to make their pursuit of Heroism real and take it out into the world. So maybe their are just two choices – vegetate or create.

The school is closed precisely so that Lori and I have more time – She is using hers to improve her photography and Photoshop skills. I am spending more time at gaming , but I am also trying to increase my knowledge by taking some online classes. I am also getting some much-neglected things done around the house, and of course supporting Lori’s photographic avocation. One of the classes we are both taking currently is Web Application Engineering at http://www.udacity.com. This is directly applicable to the School 3.0 as I am learning much more about Web site development. But it’s still going to take time, and games still call to me.

Most readers are aware of the current big trend in game financing – Starting with Tim Schafer’s “Double Fine Adventure”, and now including Wasteland, FTL, Leisure Suit Larry, and Pinkerton Road (Jane Jensen of Gabriel Knight fame), game companies are now going directly to the players for funding. Effectively they are selling pre-orders before starting on the actual game development, and using that seed money to create the games. We may start a project like this, but it will be at least six months down the road. First I am developing some basic skills (and getting back into programming), then we will create a prototype before trying to start a fundraising campaign.

Imagine my surprise when, arriving at the gates, there was no one to be seen! And then there was that small, weathered sign: “Closed for Remodeling”. This may or may not have been my reaction:

http://www.nooooooooooooooo.com/

<__> …

I don’t regret one minute of it all. The School for Heroes was the final push I needed to set out to accomplish my dreams, and I really loved the thought that went into the feedback and assignments as much as the flavor of the school (though I have to admit that I’ve always found Meeps to be creepy as hell…). Discovering the warrior in me was truly eye-opening. I had never thought before I had an ounce of a leader in myself and I’m happy to have been proven utterly wrong, in the end.

To Corey and Lori: don’t sweat about it. Now that I have an idea of just how much work it takes to change the world, I can tell you that 74 persons is quite the achievement. Also, you might have done more good than you know… Besides becoming (at last!) a freelance programmer, I now also happen to be the lead developer of a project called “Tribu” (“Tribe”, in French), which my colleague and myself describe as “an MMO in real life”.

It’s kind of an RPG, where you have an avatar, equipment, virtual money, XP, etc., but where everything you earn, you do so by doing things in real life. Players can gain experience points and level up in five different values: “community”, “culture”, “ecology”, “social skill” and “sports” and we plan to eventually add “critical thinking” and “academia”. We’re currently making deals with various community centres, co-ops and the like to get help supervising the whole thing and make sure players are actually accomplishing something.

To say that I was inspired by the School for Heroes to invest myself in this project — even though it wasn’t my idea originally — would be quite an understatement. I immediately saw the similarities and have decided to see where this adventure will lead me, no matter what. It is my hope that, in the coming years, we’ll be able to grow beyond Quebec City, find a way to make the whole thing multilingual (beyond French) and — who knows, maybe even manage to one day tie it to the School for Heroes v3.0?

If you happen to speak French and would like to see what it looks like right now, you can check it out at the following website: http://www.jeutribu.com (bear in mind that we are still very much in development)

And finally, no matter what happens, whether the School comes back or not, I wanted to say this: from the bottom of my heart, thank you!

Dawolf

1. Too much of a time sink for Lori and me. We wanted the school to grow, but could not really afford it if that happened.

2. No good way to interact with other students. We created the Student Center forums with that intention, but with no clear connection between the forums and the school assignments, they didn’t really accomplish much other than fun.

3. The tightrope Mookah mentioned between students taking the easy way out on assignments – doing no real work or learning – versus becoming paralyzed with the idea that an assignment response should be perfect. We had a similar problem – Will we discourage students by making critical comments, or will we encourage them to work harder?

For the most part, we accepted any reasonable response to an assignment. Our thought was that students who were just doing the minimum were not going to change based on our rejecting the assignment or criticizing it, so we merely gave them the minimum allowable grade. We used the “honors” system to try to encourage especially insightful assignments. Of course, that caused us to discriminate somewhat in favor of students with better writing skills.

Lori and I now think that the school needs to emphasize community to encourage “students” (let’s call them “players” instead) to keep learning and growing. We also want to make it more game-like with specific objectives and clear goals. We will tie that into either the forums or something like the assignment comments pages. We hope this will encourage players to talk about ways to apply what they learned in the game to their lives… and possibly to do some collaborative work with other players.

As for Mookah “cheating” on the hero test to join the Rogue school, I did something similar to create a Warrior persona because I felt the Warrior assignments would be valuable to me. In practice, I only did a few of them. For similar reasons, it will probably take quite a while for me to get the “school 3.0″ into playable shape.

I was here from the very start (I was also aware of the previous project How to be a hero, but I came too late for that) – I even finished most of the assignments before you started to award us with stars. But maybe I just didn’t deserve any;)

Since I finished most of the assignments quickly (and that’s because I found them most pleasing), I didn’t have much to do afterwards and peeked here only ocassionaly to see if there’s something new, maybe to type something on forum or comment some of the blog articles.

I think I was quite succesfull with “spreading the word” – my sister took the test twice and in the end she pursued the career of a Rogue. When she struggled, she came to me and I fed her with stories that she reworked as her assignments. She also managed to talk my dad into this project and he pursued the career of a Paladin (but since he doesn’t speak much English, in the end it was I who had to translate painstakingly his texts). I even managed to “enlighten” my one time date, who then became the Wizard, accompanied by her classmates. Not to mention my girlfriend who went as far as to read every single assignment that I penned.

I just wanted to say: Thank you. Thank you for your games and for your projects. You are wonderful.