I am making a terminal-based RPG to teach coding.

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:

1. Does the premise, learn embedded by surviving as a broke engineer, actually make you want to try it?

2. What would make you come back after the first lesson?

3. 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.