15 Years ago a game called Colobot was released for Windows and it was so cool that I instantly bought it after playing the demo. The game is to this day the most amazing edutainment software I have seen that is useful to both kids and adults who want to learn programming (or just play a cool game). It was made by a small company from Switzerland called Epsitec, I don’t think the game gained as much attention as it should have, but there are many dedicated fans and it has been open sourced a few years ago and a team of developers from Poland has worked on it since then and it is now available for free and runs on Windows, Linux and macOS with a bunch of new, modern graphic effects and a lot of added features compared to the original game release. They call this open source version the “Gold Edition”.
The basic premise of the game is this: You are an astronaut (with a jetpack!) who visits different planets and solves problems by programming robots (with a very C/Java like language, this is not some kids toy, it’s real programming you learn in the game). On your travels you will have to fight alien bugs in 3rd or 1st person mode, either directly by remote controlling robots, or indirectly by writing programs to make them patrol and attack aliens automatically. While fighting off the aliens, you build up your colony on the planet you are visiting with your rocket ship. You build research buildings to research new technology, you build robot factories, power plants and more and you can automate everything with robots and programming or do it yourself.
One task you might want to automate with programming is robots searching for titanium ore, transporting it to the ore converter where it’s turned into titanium blocks that can be used to build buildings or more robots. And don’t forget to program your robot to recharge his battery when it runs low! And then you can think about automating energy gathering as well. Send out robots to find uranium ore, bring it to a power plant, let robots fetch empty batteries and recharge them so that you have an automatic supply of charged batteries. Have a fleet of flying robots that wait for a distress signal from your other robots to sweep in and rescue them from alien bug attacks. Your imagination is the limit here, there are so many things you can do.
The game offers a lot of different play modes. I would recommend new players to start with the main campaign of the game. It has a story and teaches you the game and programming along the way. Later on you can go through the specific programming exercise or battle game modes, to test the skills you gained through playing the main campaign. There is also a free play mode where you can just do whatever you want. The features in the free play mode are limited to those you unlocked by playing the main campaign though, so make sure to play through that first or your abilities in free play mode will be quite limited.
Your astronaut has a handy little computer on his wrist that you can look at by pressing the F1 key. It shows you your current objectives, and also has an in-depth Wikipedia like manual explaining everything about the game and the programming language you can use to control robots. You don’t need to have a manual or text editor open on another screen, everything you need is in the game itself.
The controls are very easy. Just keep the F1 key in mind to look up things you don’t know, use WASD to move your character, and when you get the jetpack or a flying robot, you can fly up with the Shift key and down with Ctrl. You can grab things by pressing E. Moving the mouse to the sides of the screen rotates the camera. I think that’s all you need to know, but it’s explained in the game as well.
One point I want to stress again is that this is real programming you are learning in the game. There are some other games that teach you programming, often with dragging and dropping blocks, little pieces of code, and that’s cool for really young kids, but for older kids and adults it’s too dumbed down in my opinion. It teaches you the concepts of programming, but It’s too far removed from actual programming which is still completely text based.
Colobot is different and that’s a good thing. And that’s also why it’s not just appealing to kids, but also adults. It doesn’t assume the player is stupid. It assumes the player has the ability to learn. And I believe that assumption is right. I believe people are much more intelligent than even they themselves think. They just need the opportunity to show it and maybe find it out for themselves, and Colobot is an amazing opportunity like that. It makes learning fun and easy but it does require you to learn and what you learn is actually useful and you get instant gratification in the game, but since it’s real programming, you can even apply what you learned in the real world and start writing your own games or apps.
Download
You can download the game or find out more about it here. If you are using Ubuntu Linux 16.04 you can install the game right from the Ubuntu repository. It doesn’t need a fast computer and runs on all of the three major desktop operating systems, so everyone should be able to play it. Have fun!
The website of the original, commercial release of Colobot is also still up here.