Super Markup Man
Released: August 2016
Learn HTML and CSS in the context of a 2D puzzle platformer! Super Markup Man teaches real web development practices without making you write any code. Simply carry the tags around the screen and watch your website render in real-time.
Super Markup Man has a long, storied history. In 2013, I was working as a web developer and was asked by an ed tech team if I could build a game that teaches some facet of programming. What I came up with was this browser game that's still available to play today. I just don't openly advertise it, because the 2016 version is obviously the superior one.
I later tried to apply this same concept to a mobile app. Thus, the (now discontinued) "Easy HTML Practice Game" was born. Drag-and-drop didn't have quite the same feel to it as moving a character around, though. I also wanted to add CSS, since HTML on its own is not very exciting.
Meanwhile, at my day job, we were experimenting with something called NW.js that could package web apps as desktop apps. This seemed like the perfect way to take my browser-based Markup Man code, add a bunch of new content to it, and release it as a Steam game. So Markup Man not only teaches web dev technologies; it was built with web dev technologies!