21 free educational resource for game developers
The Internet is full of content creators, and everyone wants to attract attention. But, oddly enough, it is not easy to find a good educational resource, and a free one is even more difficult. We publish a translation of the material in which the author has collected links to the most authoritative and useful learning sites.
As an entrepreneur, I like to look for useful resources and select those that really deserve attention and time. We all love long lists of links, but often skim through them, add a couple to your favorites and never open them again.
')
I act differently: I carefully filter the lists of resources and dwell on one or two that seem to be the most accessible and effective. As for me, the book The Art of Game Design (The Art of Game Design) by Jesse Schell is much more useful than a selection of 50 random sites. And one detailed instructional video from the library Ctrl + Paint costs a dozen surface clips on the Gumroad website. I prefer quality courses compiled by reputable authors - less “water” and more specifics. You too? Fine! Then this article is for you.
To make a list, I rummaged through a bunch of sites and selected the best and in addition free ones. This is not an exhaustive list, but it should not be so. In any case, the proposed information should be enough for you for a long time!
Some resources may be well known to you. But other developers will see them for the first time. To please everyone, I listed both popular and lesser-known sites and organized them into categories. It is also worth clarifying that in this article the word "developer" is used in a broad sense.
Game design
1. The free section of the GDC Vault website contains many speeches by the participants of the Game Developers Conference (GDC). Here you can get valuable tips on creating games from the most experienced and well-known developers. While Gamasutra publishes primarily text-based content, GDC Vault focuses on videos and presentations. The GDC content archive can also be found on the YouTube channel. Every week there are fresh performances of the leaders of the gaming industry.
2. Pixel Prospector - an excellent source of resources for creating games. In addition to the resources themselves, conveniently organized by category, here you can find a detailed free guide to marketing indie games. In addition, Pixel Prospector has several minor projects, including the Big List of YouTubers - a list of game reviewers on YouTube with languages ​​and favorite genres, and VideoGameJournaliser - a large list of video game sites.
3. Extra Credits - a popular YouTube channel with short thematic videos about game design. In addition, it has game recommendations and educational lectures on history, which will soon appear in the Khan Academy. In Extra Credits videos there are always a lot of interesting facts and often the latest game trends are presented, so this is a great resource for those who want to be aware of the development of the industry.
4. Three Hundred Mechanics - a very worthwhile site that was suggested to me by a friend of mine, a developer. The creator of the site, Sean Howard, set out to create 300 game concepts. He provides a detailed description of each idea, algorithms and stages of implementation. The mechanics presented on the site belong to different genres and are themselves quite original. I especially like the section on procedural generation — good content on this topic is not as common. On the partner site, Three Hundred Prototypes , you can download a few HTML5 test games that demonstrate some of these concepts.
5. Donjon is a highly specialized site for the creators of RPG games. It contains special programs that generate textual content and numeric values ​​so that you do not have to do it manually. With their help, you can create dungeons, shops and other locations with random descriptions, character names, calendar systems, etc. In addition, you can find useful tools for games based on the role-playing system Dungeons & Dragons, as well as fantasy and fantastic universes. Despite the fact that in the first place the site is intended for board games, it certainly will be useful to the creators of RPG.
The next item will interest fans of platformers.
6. Theory and practice of selling cameras in side-scrollers - an article on the Gamasutra website dedicated to the design of controllers for side-scrolling platformers. The material is a detailed study of controllers and examines how to implement them. This article is unique in its own way, and I would very much like to see such publications more often.
Bonus The Game Accessibility Guidelines site, as the name suggests, is dedicated to the issue of video game accessibility for people with disabilities. Here you can find many universal recommendations for improving the ergonomics of games in order to expand the audience of gamers. Information is divided into 3 categories depending on the complexity of the implementation and the volume of the target audience. More on this topic can be found in my article.
Development
I am a novice developer, so when choosing materials for this category, I turned to my more experienced colleague for help.
7. Game Programming Patterns is a free book about programming patterns in the context of game development. Each chapter describes a separate template and provides a specific example of its use. This is probably the main advantage of the book: it always demonstrates the merits of a particular template. The author also points out the limitations of various patterns and talks about how they evolved. All examples are written in C ++, but they are short and easy to read. Another plus of this resource is a column with additional comments by the author, eliminating any gaps that could be in the original book.
8. Ludum Dare can not be called a purely educational resource. Many of you have probably heard about this site: several times a year game gems are held here - competitions in high-speed game development. For developers, this is a great opportunity to practice and gain valuable experience, but there is no free content here. Why did we include this site in our list? It's simple: open access to the source code and resources for each game participating in the competition. For example, based on the work of the developer Deepnight, you can learn how to structure the haxe code. At each competition, many original concepts are presented, and you can see how they are implemented.
9. Github Education Pack occupies a special place in the list, because it is intended for schoolchildren and students. This package contains paid services for developers, which can be obtained completely free of charge by presenting a valid student ID or email address on the school's domain. Among the resources offered, you can find very useful and expensive solutions, such as cloud hosting or private storage on GitHib. If you have any familiar students or schoolchildren who may find this useful, be sure to share a link with them!
Digital art
10. Resource ctrlpaint.com offers a full free course of digital drawing. Here you will find more than 200 five-minute tutorials on various topics. Lesson writer Matt Kohr is a freelance illustrator working in the entertainment and video games industry. Matt teaches material in a very accessible and interesting manner on the example of his own works.
11. The Proko YouTube channel is dedicated to exploring various techniques for imaging the human body. This is an excellent resource for students of art universities, concept artists and game illustrators, allowing a better understanding of human anatomy. Proko videos are beautifully mounted and often use animation to illustrate certain concepts.
12. 2D Game Art For Programmers is a blog by Chris Hildenbrand, a game illustrator with 20 years of experience using vector graphic editors. The blog subtitle says: “Life is too short to waste on bad graphics.” Chris makes available instructional videos for programmers and other non-graphics professionals. Animation, vector graphics, modularity of game assets - the blog discusses many techniques and tools designed to make life easier for illustrators. In the latest videos, Chris uses Inkscape , a free open source tool with extensive functionality.
13. GDquest (Game Design Quest) - a YouTube channel dedicated to game art and occupying a separate niche between text content 2D Game Art For Programmers and the site Ctrl + Paint, focused on concept art. GDquest offers about 70 detailed video tutorials and new releases every week. First of all, the channel pays attention to 2D art, but there are also several videos dedicated to game design. New videos are released on Thursdays in English and French.
14. Articles on Technical Art: Game Art Tricks analyze game art from a technical point of view. On the example of games of different genres (Diablo III, Assassin's Creed III and even Edmund McMillen's The Binding of Isaac), original approaches to rendering and creating assets are considered here. Have you ever wondered how the parallax effect is implemented in Don't Starve? Or how 2K Games made an improvised render for reflections on windows in BioShock Infinite? These and many other solutions are described in detail on the site.
15. Android Arts - an archive of articles by talented Swedish artist Niklas Jansson. At the very beginning of the list is a general guide describing the basic principles and techniques of digital drawing. In addition, Niklas publishes interesting, albeit slightly chaotic descriptions of his projects, accompanied by many illustrations. Android Arts is not a learning resource per se, but here you can still learn a lot.
Narration
16. Seven Camels , or Temple of the Seven Golden Camels, is a blog of storyboard artist Mark Kennedy (Mark Kennedy), who worked on the creation of Disney cartoon films “Cold Heart”, “Rapunzel” and “Tarzan”. Since 2006, Mark has been sharing his visual narrative experience by analyzing scenes from films and explaining the basic principles of design and staging. Each post is divided into small informative paragraphs and contains many illustrations. If you want to create high-quality visual compositions and exciting stories for your games, this blog is what you need.
In his blog, Mark Kennedy lays out the basic principles of visual narration.
17. Among the writers and writers of the book The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler (Christopher Vogler) is considered a textbook. The author develops the idea described by Joseph Campbell in The Thousand Faces (Joseph Cambell), arguing that most myths have a common plot structure. If you are interested in understanding this theory, you can read the The Hero's Jorney practical guide, which Vogler wrote specifically for the staff of the Walt Disney studio.
Reference materials
In game development, you always need to be guided by something, be it background information or drawings. Information can be found at least on Wikipedia. But quality illustrations on the web are not as common. The following resources will help you find inspiration for projects.
18. Reddit SWF Porn Network is not at all what the name suggests. This is a specialized subreddit network with beautiful images. Here you can find picturesque landscapes, rare species of animals and many original design ideas.
Now you see where Earthporn comes from.
19. The Creative Uncut website has collected a lot of illustrations for computer and console games, including Odin Sphere , Breath of Fire V, and even the announced Dark Souls III . In addition, the images do not have watermarks.
General knowledge
Game development is not limited to game design, programming and graphics. For example, math skills are always useful. And to communicate with the audience or enter a new market, it will not hurt to learn a foreign language. General knowledge broadens our horizons and opens up new horizons for us. Therefore, we end our list with two free online resources where you can learn a little bit of everything. What exactly - you decide.
20. No Excuse List is a list of sites offering free courses in music, foreign languages, programming, etc. Among other things, Coursera and Khan Academy are here - 2 of my favorite educational sites.
21. The University of Reddit is another site with free courses on various subjects, including social sciences, game development, computer science, philosophy, etc. All lectures are organized by category, and the likes system allows you to quickly find the most popular lessons.
Conclusion
Now you have enough materials to go into the study of game development. If you do not find your favorite educational resource in this list, be sure to write about it in the comments!
As an entrepreneur, I like to look for useful resources and select those that really deserve attention and time. We all love long lists of links, but often skim through them, add a couple to your favorites and never open them again.
')
I act differently: I carefully filter the lists of resources and dwell on one or two that seem to be the most accessible and effective. As for me, the book The Art of Game Design (The Art of Game Design) by Jesse Schell is much more useful than a selection of 50 random sites. And one detailed instructional video from the library Ctrl + Paint costs a dozen surface clips on the Gumroad website. I prefer quality courses compiled by reputable authors - less “water” and more specifics. You too? Fine! Then this article is for you.
To make a list, I rummaged through a bunch of sites and selected the best and in addition free ones. This is not an exhaustive list, but it should not be so. In any case, the proposed information should be enough for you for a long time!
Some resources may be well known to you. But other developers will see them for the first time. To please everyone, I listed both popular and lesser-known sites and organized them into categories. It is also worth clarifying that in this article the word "developer" is used in a broad sense.
Game design
1. The free section of the GDC Vault website contains many speeches by the participants of the Game Developers Conference (GDC). Here you can get valuable tips on creating games from the most experienced and well-known developers. While Gamasutra publishes primarily text-based content, GDC Vault focuses on videos and presentations. The GDC content archive can also be found on the YouTube channel. Every week there are fresh performances of the leaders of the gaming industry.
2. Pixel Prospector - an excellent source of resources for creating games. In addition to the resources themselves, conveniently organized by category, here you can find a detailed free guide to marketing indie games. In addition, Pixel Prospector has several minor projects, including the Big List of YouTubers - a list of game reviewers on YouTube with languages ​​and favorite genres, and VideoGameJournaliser - a large list of video game sites.
3. Extra Credits - a popular YouTube channel with short thematic videos about game design. In addition, it has game recommendations and educational lectures on history, which will soon appear in the Khan Academy. In Extra Credits videos there are always a lot of interesting facts and often the latest game trends are presented, so this is a great resource for those who want to be aware of the development of the industry.
4. Three Hundred Mechanics - a very worthwhile site that was suggested to me by a friend of mine, a developer. The creator of the site, Sean Howard, set out to create 300 game concepts. He provides a detailed description of each idea, algorithms and stages of implementation. The mechanics presented on the site belong to different genres and are themselves quite original. I especially like the section on procedural generation — good content on this topic is not as common. On the partner site, Three Hundred Prototypes , you can download a few HTML5 test games that demonstrate some of these concepts.
5. Donjon is a highly specialized site for the creators of RPG games. It contains special programs that generate textual content and numeric values ​​so that you do not have to do it manually. With their help, you can create dungeons, shops and other locations with random descriptions, character names, calendar systems, etc. In addition, you can find useful tools for games based on the role-playing system Dungeons & Dragons, as well as fantasy and fantastic universes. Despite the fact that in the first place the site is intended for board games, it certainly will be useful to the creators of RPG.
The next item will interest fans of platformers.
6. Theory and practice of selling cameras in side-scrollers - an article on the Gamasutra website dedicated to the design of controllers for side-scrolling platformers. The material is a detailed study of controllers and examines how to implement them. This article is unique in its own way, and I would very much like to see such publications more often.
Bonus The Game Accessibility Guidelines site, as the name suggests, is dedicated to the issue of video game accessibility for people with disabilities. Here you can find many universal recommendations for improving the ergonomics of games in order to expand the audience of gamers. Information is divided into 3 categories depending on the complexity of the implementation and the volume of the target audience. More on this topic can be found in my article.
Development
I am a novice developer, so when choosing materials for this category, I turned to my more experienced colleague for help.
7. Game Programming Patterns is a free book about programming patterns in the context of game development. Each chapter describes a separate template and provides a specific example of its use. This is probably the main advantage of the book: it always demonstrates the merits of a particular template. The author also points out the limitations of various patterns and talks about how they evolved. All examples are written in C ++, but they are short and easy to read. Another plus of this resource is a column with additional comments by the author, eliminating any gaps that could be in the original book.
8. Ludum Dare can not be called a purely educational resource. Many of you have probably heard about this site: several times a year game gems are held here - competitions in high-speed game development. For developers, this is a great opportunity to practice and gain valuable experience, but there is no free content here. Why did we include this site in our list? It's simple: open access to the source code and resources for each game participating in the competition. For example, based on the work of the developer Deepnight, you can learn how to structure the haxe code. At each competition, many original concepts are presented, and you can see how they are implemented.
9. Github Education Pack occupies a special place in the list, because it is intended for schoolchildren and students. This package contains paid services for developers, which can be obtained completely free of charge by presenting a valid student ID or email address on the school's domain. Among the resources offered, you can find very useful and expensive solutions, such as cloud hosting or private storage on GitHib. If you have any familiar students or schoolchildren who may find this useful, be sure to share a link with them!
Digital art
10. Resource ctrlpaint.com offers a full free course of digital drawing. Here you will find more than 200 five-minute tutorials on various topics. Lesson writer Matt Kohr is a freelance illustrator working in the entertainment and video games industry. Matt teaches material in a very accessible and interesting manner on the example of his own works.
11. The Proko YouTube channel is dedicated to exploring various techniques for imaging the human body. This is an excellent resource for students of art universities, concept artists and game illustrators, allowing a better understanding of human anatomy. Proko videos are beautifully mounted and often use animation to illustrate certain concepts.
12. 2D Game Art For Programmers is a blog by Chris Hildenbrand, a game illustrator with 20 years of experience using vector graphic editors. The blog subtitle says: “Life is too short to waste on bad graphics.” Chris makes available instructional videos for programmers and other non-graphics professionals. Animation, vector graphics, modularity of game assets - the blog discusses many techniques and tools designed to make life easier for illustrators. In the latest videos, Chris uses Inkscape , a free open source tool with extensive functionality.
13. GDquest (Game Design Quest) - a YouTube channel dedicated to game art and occupying a separate niche between text content 2D Game Art For Programmers and the site Ctrl + Paint, focused on concept art. GDquest offers about 70 detailed video tutorials and new releases every week. First of all, the channel pays attention to 2D art, but there are also several videos dedicated to game design. New videos are released on Thursdays in English and French.
14. Articles on Technical Art: Game Art Tricks analyze game art from a technical point of view. On the example of games of different genres (Diablo III, Assassin's Creed III and even Edmund McMillen's The Binding of Isaac), original approaches to rendering and creating assets are considered here. Have you ever wondered how the parallax effect is implemented in Don't Starve? Or how 2K Games made an improvised render for reflections on windows in BioShock Infinite? These and many other solutions are described in detail on the site.
15. Android Arts - an archive of articles by talented Swedish artist Niklas Jansson. At the very beginning of the list is a general guide describing the basic principles and techniques of digital drawing. In addition, Niklas publishes interesting, albeit slightly chaotic descriptions of his projects, accompanied by many illustrations. Android Arts is not a learning resource per se, but here you can still learn a lot.
Narration
16. Seven Camels , or Temple of the Seven Golden Camels, is a blog of storyboard artist Mark Kennedy (Mark Kennedy), who worked on the creation of Disney cartoon films “Cold Heart”, “Rapunzel” and “Tarzan”. Since 2006, Mark has been sharing his visual narrative experience by analyzing scenes from films and explaining the basic principles of design and staging. Each post is divided into small informative paragraphs and contains many illustrations. If you want to create high-quality visual compositions and exciting stories for your games, this blog is what you need.
In his blog, Mark Kennedy lays out the basic principles of visual narration.
17. Among the writers and writers of the book The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler (Christopher Vogler) is considered a textbook. The author develops the idea described by Joseph Campbell in The Thousand Faces (Joseph Cambell), arguing that most myths have a common plot structure. If you are interested in understanding this theory, you can read the The Hero's Jorney practical guide, which Vogler wrote specifically for the staff of the Walt Disney studio.
Reference materials
In game development, you always need to be guided by something, be it background information or drawings. Information can be found at least on Wikipedia. But quality illustrations on the web are not as common. The following resources will help you find inspiration for projects.
18. Reddit SWF Porn Network is not at all what the name suggests. This is a specialized subreddit network with beautiful images. Here you can find picturesque landscapes, rare species of animals and many original design ideas.
Now you see where Earthporn comes from.
19. The Creative Uncut website has collected a lot of illustrations for computer and console games, including Odin Sphere , Breath of Fire V, and even the announced Dark Souls III . In addition, the images do not have watermarks.
General knowledge
Game development is not limited to game design, programming and graphics. For example, math skills are always useful. And to communicate with the audience or enter a new market, it will not hurt to learn a foreign language. General knowledge broadens our horizons and opens up new horizons for us. Therefore, we end our list with two free online resources where you can learn a little bit of everything. What exactly - you decide.
20. No Excuse List is a list of sites offering free courses in music, foreign languages, programming, etc. Among other things, Coursera and Khan Academy are here - 2 of my favorite educational sites.
21. The University of Reddit is another site with free courses on various subjects, including social sciences, game development, computer science, philosophy, etc. All lectures are organized by category, and the likes system allows you to quickly find the most popular lessons.
Conclusion
Now you have enough materials to go into the study of game development. If you do not find your favorite educational resource in this list, be sure to write about it in the comments!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/275027/
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