January 13, 2016 at 14:4121 free training resources for game developers
- Transfer
The Internet is full of content creators, and everyone wants to attract attention. But, oddly enough, a good learning resource is not easy to find, and free is even harder. We publish a translation of the material in which the author has collected links to the most authoritative and useful training 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 focus on one or two that seem to be the most affordable and effective. As for me, Jesse Schell’s book The Art of Game Design is much more useful than a selection of 50 random sites. And one detailed instructional video from the Ctrl + Paint library costs a dozen surface videos on the Gumroad website. I prefer quality courses compiled by reputable authors - less “water” and more specificity. You too? Excellent! Then this article is for you.
To make a list, I rummaged through a bunch of sites and selected from them the best and in addition free. 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 less well-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 participants in the GDC (Game Developers Conference). Here you can get valuable advice on creating games from the most experienced and well-known developers. While Gamasutra primarily publishes textual content, GDC Vault focuses on videos and presentations. The GDC content archive can also be found on the YouTube channel.Every week, fresh performances by game industry leaders appear here.
2. Pixel Prospector - a great source of resources for creating games. In addition to the resources themselves, conveniently sorted into categories, here you can find a detailed free indie game marketing guide. In addition, the Pixel Prospector has several secondary 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 CreditsIs a popular YouTube channel with short thematic game design videos. In addition, it has game recommendations and informative lectures on history, which will soon appear at the Khan Academy. Extra Credits commercials always have a lot of interesting facts and often show the latest gaming trends, so this is an excellent resource for those who want to keep abreast of the development of the industry.
4. Three Hundred Mechanics is a very worthwhile site that was suggested to me by a friend of mine. The creator of the site, Sean Howard (Sean Howard), set out to create 300 game concepts. He provides a detailed description of each idea, algorithms, and implementation steps. The mechanics presented on the site belong to different genres and are quite original in themselves. I especially like the section onprocedural generation - good content on this topic is not so common. On the partner site, Three Hundred Prototypes , you can download several HTML5 test games that demonstrate some of these concepts.
5. DonjonIs a highly specialized site for creators of RPG games. It contains special programs that generate text content and numerical values so that you do not need to do this manually. With their help, you can create dungeons, shops and other locations with random descriptions, character names, chronological systems, etc. In addition, here you can find useful tools for games based on the role-playing system Dungeons & Dragons, as well as fantasy and fantasy universes. Despite the fact that the site is primarily intended for board games, it will certainly be useful to the creators of RPG.
The next item will interest platformer lovers.
6. Theory and practice of implementing 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 the controllers and considers methods for their implementation. This article is unique in its kind, 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 accessibility of video games 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. The information is divided into 3 categories depending on the complexity of the implementation and the size of the target audience. You can learn more about this topic from 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 - a free book on programming patterns in the context of game development. Each chapter describes a separate template and provides a specific example of its use. This is perhaps 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 Darecan not be called a purely educational resource. Many of you have probably heard about this site: several times a year game games are held here - competitions for 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 on 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 Deepnight developer, you can learn how to structure a haxe code. At each competition, many original concepts are presented, and you can see how they are implemented.
9. Github Education PackIt 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 for free by presenting a valid student ID or email address on the school’s domain. Among the proposed resources you can find very useful and expensive solutions, such as cloud hosting or private storage on GitHib. If you have familiar students or schoolchildren who might find this useful, be sure to share a link with them!
Digital Art
10. Resource ctrlpaint.comoffers a complete free digital drawing course. Here you will find over 200 five-minute training videos on various topics. Lesson author Matt Kohr is a freelance illustrator working in the entertainment and video game industries. Matt teaches material in a very accessible and interesting manner, using his own work as an example.
11. Proko 's YouTube channel is dedicated to exploring various techniques for displaying the human body. This is an excellent resource for students of art universities, concept artists and game illustrators, allowing you to better understand human anatomy. Proko videos are beautifully mounted and often use animation to illustrate concepts.
12. 2D Game Art For Programmers- The blog of Chris Hildenbrand, a game illustrator with 20 years of experience using vector graphics editors. The blog subtitle reads: “Life is too short to spend on poor graphics.” Chris makes accessible instructional videos for programmers and other non-graphics professionals. Animation, vector graphics, modularity of game assets - the blog discusses many tricks and tools designed to make life easier for illustrators. In the latest commercials, Chris uses Inkscape , a free open source tool with wide functionality.
13. GDquest(Game Design Quest) - YouTube channel dedicated to game art and occupying a separate niche between the text content of 2D Game Art For Programmers and the website Ctrl + Paint, focused on concept art. GDquest offers around 70 in-depth video tutorials and new releases every week. The channel primarily focuses on 2D art, but there are also some videos about game design here. New videos are released on Thursdays in English and French.
14. Articles on Technical Art: Game Art Tricksanalyze game art from a technical point of view. For example, games of different genres (Diablo III, Assassin's Creed III, and even The Binding of Isaac by Edmund McMillen) discuss original approaches to rendering and creating assets. Ever wondered how the parallax effect is implemented in Don't Starve? Or how did 2K Games make an impromptu render for window reflections in BioShock Infinite? These and many other solutions are described in detail on the site.
15. Android Arts - an archive of articles by the talented Swedish artist Niklas Jansson (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 an educational resource per se, but you can still learn a lot here.
Narration
16. Seven Camels, or Temple of the Seven Golden Camels, a blog by storyboard artist Mark Kennedy, who worked on Disney's Frozen, Rapunzel, and Tarzan cartoons. Since 2006, Mark shares his experience in visual storytelling, analyzing scenes from films and explaining the basic principles of design and production. 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.
On his blog, Mark Kennedy puts the basic principles of visual storytelling on a shelf
17. Among writers and screenwriters, The Writer's JourneyChristopher Vogler (Christopher Vogler) is considered a textbook. The author develops the idea described by Joseph Campbell in Joseph Cambell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, proving that most myths have a common plot structure. If you are interested in understanding this theory, you can read The Hero's Jorney's practical guide , which Vogler wrote specifically for Walt Disney studio staff.
Reference materials
In the development of games, you always need to focus on something, whether it is reference information or drawings. Information can be found at least on Wikipedia. But high-quality illustrations on the Web are not so common. The following resources will help you find inspiration for your projects.
18. Reddit SWF Porn Network- Not at all what can be assumed from the name. 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 can see where Earthporn got its name from
19. The Creative Uncut website has many illustrations for computer and console games, including Odin Sphere , Breath of Fire V, and even the announced Dark Souls III . In addition, there are no watermarks in the images.
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 does 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 is up to you.
20. No Excuse List - this is a list of sites that provide free courses in music, foreign languages, programming, etc. Among other things, Coursera and the Khan Academy are presented here - 2 of my favorite educational sites.
21. The University of Reddit- Another site with free courses in various subjects, including social sciences, game development, computer science, philosophy, etc. All lectures are organized by category, and the like system allows you to quickly find the most popular lessons.
Conclusion
Now you have enough materials to go headlong into the study of game development. If you did 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 focus on one or two that seem to be the most affordable and effective. As for me, Jesse Schell’s book The Art of Game Design is much more useful than a selection of 50 random sites. And one detailed instructional video from the Ctrl + Paint library costs a dozen surface videos on the Gumroad website. I prefer quality courses compiled by reputable authors - less “water” and more specificity. You too? Excellent! Then this article is for you.
To make a list, I rummaged through a bunch of sites and selected from them the best and in addition free. 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 less well-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 participants in the GDC (Game Developers Conference). Here you can get valuable advice on creating games from the most experienced and well-known developers. While Gamasutra primarily publishes textual content, GDC Vault focuses on videos and presentations. The GDC content archive can also be found on the YouTube channel.Every week, fresh performances by game industry leaders appear here.
2. Pixel Prospector - a great source of resources for creating games. In addition to the resources themselves, conveniently sorted into categories, here you can find a detailed free indie game marketing guide. In addition, the Pixel Prospector has several secondary 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 CreditsIs a popular YouTube channel with short thematic game design videos. In addition, it has game recommendations and informative lectures on history, which will soon appear at the Khan Academy. Extra Credits commercials always have a lot of interesting facts and often show the latest gaming trends, so this is an excellent resource for those who want to keep abreast of the development of the industry.
4. Three Hundred Mechanics is a very worthwhile site that was suggested to me by a friend of mine. The creator of the site, Sean Howard (Sean Howard), set out to create 300 game concepts. He provides a detailed description of each idea, algorithms, and implementation steps. The mechanics presented on the site belong to different genres and are quite original in themselves. I especially like the section onprocedural generation - good content on this topic is not so common. On the partner site, Three Hundred Prototypes , you can download several HTML5 test games that demonstrate some of these concepts.
5. DonjonIs a highly specialized site for creators of RPG games. It contains special programs that generate text content and numerical values so that you do not need to do this manually. With their help, you can create dungeons, shops and other locations with random descriptions, character names, chronological systems, etc. In addition, here you can find useful tools for games based on the role-playing system Dungeons & Dragons, as well as fantasy and fantasy universes. Despite the fact that the site is primarily intended for board games, it will certainly be useful to the creators of RPG.
The next item will interest platformer lovers.
6. Theory and practice of implementing 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 the controllers and considers methods for their implementation. This article is unique in its kind, 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 accessibility of video games 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. The information is divided into 3 categories depending on the complexity of the implementation and the size of the target audience. You can learn more about this topic from 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 - a free book on programming patterns in the context of game development. Each chapter describes a separate template and provides a specific example of its use. This is perhaps 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 Darecan not be called a purely educational resource. Many of you have probably heard about this site: several times a year game games are held here - competitions for 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 on 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 Deepnight developer, you can learn how to structure a haxe code. At each competition, many original concepts are presented, and you can see how they are implemented.
9. Github Education PackIt 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 for free by presenting a valid student ID or email address on the school’s domain. Among the proposed resources you can find very useful and expensive solutions, such as cloud hosting or private storage on GitHib. If you have familiar students or schoolchildren who might find this useful, be sure to share a link with them!
Digital Art
10. Resource ctrlpaint.comoffers a complete free digital drawing course. Here you will find over 200 five-minute training videos on various topics. Lesson author Matt Kohr is a freelance illustrator working in the entertainment and video game industries. Matt teaches material in a very accessible and interesting manner, using his own work as an example.
11. Proko 's YouTube channel is dedicated to exploring various techniques for displaying the human body. This is an excellent resource for students of art universities, concept artists and game illustrators, allowing you to better understand human anatomy. Proko videos are beautifully mounted and often use animation to illustrate concepts.
12. 2D Game Art For Programmers- The blog of Chris Hildenbrand, a game illustrator with 20 years of experience using vector graphics editors. The blog subtitle reads: “Life is too short to spend on poor graphics.” Chris makes accessible instructional videos for programmers and other non-graphics professionals. Animation, vector graphics, modularity of game assets - the blog discusses many tricks and tools designed to make life easier for illustrators. In the latest commercials, Chris uses Inkscape , a free open source tool with wide functionality.
13. GDquest(Game Design Quest) - YouTube channel dedicated to game art and occupying a separate niche between the text content of 2D Game Art For Programmers and the website Ctrl + Paint, focused on concept art. GDquest offers around 70 in-depth video tutorials and new releases every week. The channel primarily focuses on 2D art, but there are also some videos about game design here. New videos are released on Thursdays in English and French.
14. Articles on Technical Art: Game Art Tricksanalyze game art from a technical point of view. For example, games of different genres (Diablo III, Assassin's Creed III, and even The Binding of Isaac by Edmund McMillen) discuss original approaches to rendering and creating assets. Ever wondered how the parallax effect is implemented in Don't Starve? Or how did 2K Games make an impromptu render for window reflections in BioShock Infinite? These and many other solutions are described in detail on the site.
15. Android Arts - an archive of articles by the talented Swedish artist Niklas Jansson (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 an educational resource per se, but you can still learn a lot here.
Narration
16. Seven Camels, or Temple of the Seven Golden Camels, a blog by storyboard artist Mark Kennedy, who worked on Disney's Frozen, Rapunzel, and Tarzan cartoons. Since 2006, Mark shares his experience in visual storytelling, analyzing scenes from films and explaining the basic principles of design and production. 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.
On his blog, Mark Kennedy puts the basic principles of visual storytelling on a shelf
17. Among writers and screenwriters, The Writer's JourneyChristopher Vogler (Christopher Vogler) is considered a textbook. The author develops the idea described by Joseph Campbell in Joseph Cambell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, proving that most myths have a common plot structure. If you are interested in understanding this theory, you can read The Hero's Jorney's practical guide , which Vogler wrote specifically for Walt Disney studio staff.
Reference materials
In the development of games, you always need to focus on something, whether it is reference information or drawings. Information can be found at least on Wikipedia. But high-quality illustrations on the Web are not so common. The following resources will help you find inspiration for your projects.
18. Reddit SWF Porn Network- Not at all what can be assumed from the name. 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 can see where Earthporn got its name from
19. The Creative Uncut website has many illustrations for computer and console games, including Odin Sphere , Breath of Fire V, and even the announced Dark Souls III . In addition, there are no watermarks in the images.
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 does 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 is up to you.
20. No Excuse List - this is a list of sites that provide free courses in music, foreign languages, programming, etc. Among other things, Coursera and the Khan Academy are presented here - 2 of my favorite educational sites.
21. The University of Reddit- Another site with free courses in various subjects, including social sciences, game development, computer science, philosophy, etc. All lectures are organized by category, and the like system allows you to quickly find the most popular lessons.
Conclusion
Now you have enough materials to go headlong into the study of game development. If you did not find your favorite educational resource in this list, be sure to write about it in the comments!
