Zac Canann presents Squally to Guillermo Rauch — Pioneer Livestream Day 1

everyone all right super stoked to be here so I'm Zack and I'm working on squally which is a PC game to teach low-level computer science specifically this game covers skills needed for reverse engineering things like binary hex and assembly language the problem that this game solves is that nobody is teaching low-level computer science effectively the existing learning resources are scattered and frustratingly bad and this is a problem I experienced myself when I tried to learn this stuff as a kid and the

learning material hasn't gotten much better since then the opportunity here is that hacking is one of the few domains with kids actively seeking educational content and to a kid it's not obvious how math and history can help you but it's very obvious how hacking might help you and this is a segment of users continuously being let down so that's the background let's get into the actual gameplay so it's a real game real graphics here's an example of how we teach assembly language so this

enemy is about to throw a healing potion that'll keep increasing their health by one and we can go into hacker mode view the code that powers is healing we have this increment health function and now we can pull up the assembly language and here we have this increment instruction we can change it to a decrement and now that enemy's health is temporarily decreasing by one the idea is just to introduce assembly language gradually through gameplay there are also several mini games in squally here's a minigame that teaches binary decimal and hexed or a card game I actually had one user a

kid stay up late playing this game and to me that's absolutely wild this material is usually incredibly boring and through gamification squally is able to turn otherwise tedious content into entertainment so currently this game is released as early access on Steam for $25 and we've got about 16 km sales since November and the game is still actually fairly early in development so in the upcoming months I'll be heads down developing more content I'm currently bootstrapping and developing this game solo full-time and

I'm seeking 100 K in funding to hire another developer to move faster afterwards it's just a matter of figuring out act 2 and that's whether or not I can do more with the user base that I'm building thank you excellent what makes me really excited about this is that I started learning programming as a kid and I always wanted to learn the real programming the things that the adults would do I just needed

approachable ways of doing so I think this perfectly fits the bill so my first question is you have some early traction in sales so how are kids gonna acquire this game is it on the App Store for iOS or is it gonna be there is it on Steam tell me about how five-year-old the r-mo gets this game okay yeah so right now it's on Steam desktop cross-platform so Mac Linux Windows and I'm trying to win

the SEO game here so like I actually uh I create I I develop an open-source hacking software and I link to this game from there and I just launched like YouTube lecture series on game hacking and so the idea is that anyone googling game hacking I hope that they stumble across my game and that's awesome I looked a little bit into the Minecraft community and I saw that a lot of kids get really excited about reverse engineering the game and they distributed code mods for it so I think that's probably a really good way of

getting getting this out there the next question that I have is as far as the business model goes is it a free game with add-ons how do you how do you eventually they start free I assume and then how do you make money so it's actually just a one-time purchase they go there it's like $25 they buy the game there's no there's no like monthly subscription none of that stuff so it's not like the most favorable business model but it is kind of like the business model product fit I think this