Help this game get on Steam!

Use HTML and CSS to solve puzzles in this educational platformer.

In the land of markup you must use knowledge and creativity to navigate the land and save your friend. By using HTML elements and CSS styles you can build platforms to find your way home. As you gain experience and knowledge you can use clever tricks and scripts to make your journey easier.

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Please keep in mind when assessing the game and casting your vote that the game is intended for young children from grade 1 to grade 4. Our play testing has shown that kids, with a bit of help from adults, enjoy playing the game and actually do very well.

Initially we were surprised how well kids did. We feared that exposing them to literal markup would be too confusing. They are learning something, really. And learning something, even if it's a very small subset of web design, is good. Honestly what they're really learning is a type of math and reading, initially.

We've also found adults get a kick out of trying to cheat the game using their web knowledge.

I really cherish a few key educational games that I played in schools and at home as a kid. Three that come to mind are Cross Country, Think Quick and Super Gizmos and Gadgets. They have a place in my heart and I'd love to have that kind of impact on kids today.

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The entire game is written in pure javscript and HTML. The includes the collision library, gravity library and the text input box/parser. All of the elements you see on screen, the player, the platforms, the goal, the world are native HTML elements. This is not a canvas or some other visual representation. For example all of the grass lands are actual DIVs that the player element can collide with.

In other words this isn't just a visual representation of web languages, it's literally a rendering of the code and markup provided to the engine.

We override native elements in this game to make them relevant to a game world. For example spawning an A tag on the page will place a portal at the position you specify. The portal will transport the player to a relative anchor elsewhere on the page. Some portals don't allow players, just objects. A portal, plus a box, plus a switch, plus gravity can make for an interesting and familiar puzzle... keep in mind the game has gravity.

This game uses a full javascript interpreter. The input box in the game can accept HTML, CSS and JAVASCRIPT natively. So you can use your imagination to do all sorts of things as your skill set grows. We encourage intermediate to advanced players to modify the source code of the game live to discover and exploit new ways to finish the levels.

In our web version of the game, we have received images and videos from players all over the world (35,000+ players to-date) showing off their crafty skills to exploit the game world. Turning platforms into elevators, making the player follow the mouse, shrinking the world so the goal and the player collide, etc. It actually makes us happy to see people try hard to 'cheat' the system and show us how they did it.

***Early Access***

I want everyone to be aware that our intent is to publish this game under early access so that we can keep building on the curriculum that's offered in the game. We would ask anyone who's familiar with web design and interested in education to join the community, beta test, and contribute to discussion around building this out.

The game engine itself is a good platform which we can expand coding examples upon pretty easily. Also our game engine is open source. So for the audience this game was intended, the beginner can learn some very basic markup and scripting. Having it on Steam widens this audience.

For the intermediate users, they can take the source code and build their own web-based platform games. This intermediate portion would be outside of the scope of steam. They would fork the engine on Github.

The reason I suggest intermediate users can make their own platform web games with our engine is we tried all of the existing open source collision libraries for HTML and found them to fall short in functionality or performance. We ended up writing our own collision library from scratch. So, to the audience that might use our collision library, they can consider this game to be a working tech demo of the complete engine.

You can play an earlier version of the game right now in your browser at http://supermarkupworld.com/. The intent of rolling this into a stand alone package is to increase discovery of the game and to allow ease of distribution.

The packaged version is going to contain new content based on existing feedback from school boards and from community feedback that I hope you will provide.

We have put many hours into this game for free, as all indie devs do of course. If we can make a couple bucks in the steam market to help pay for our time improving the game in the future that would be great. Our team did this all in our spare time and it's time for the market to decide if we should continue to expand the feature set of the game, and the engine.