- Do you want to learn game development but your budget is literally zero?
- Have you wanted to learn how to make a game for a while, but don't know where to even start?
- Are you intimidated by the more technical parts of game development?
These days there's no shortage of tutorials to learn how to make games: There's so many, in fact, that the very task of deciding which ones to go with can feel overwhelming in itself, and second-guessing all the time if you should switch to a different set of tutorials can be very distracting. With this thread, I aim to alleviating as much as possible of that choice paralysis, and recommend just a couple of different options that I think are the cream of the crop as far as introductions to game development is concerned.
Word of warning that both of my picks focus on Unity. I personally think of Unity as the closest to the Goldilocks principle choice of "easy enough to get into, powerful enough to do whatever you want" there is in game development. Of course, everyone has its own favorite engine / environment, and Unity is not free of some bullshit, like every other one, but I've heard enough praise from people coming to Unity from other engines that I feel reasonably confident in recommending it. Additionally, an advantage to both picks being Unity-based, is that they can complement each other very well. You can follow one, the other, or both to get a wider, fuller understanding of Unity and game development as a whole.
Without further ado, here's my personal picks!
Pick #1: Michigan State University's Game Design and Development online courses
A bit of an intro here. I actually learned to use Unity with the previous, older version of these courses, and they were so good and engaging that in a couple of months I was entirely prepared to make my own game from scratch. The best news is that they've been recently completely reworked from the ground up to focus even more intensively on game development and are now entirely imparted by the one that's by far my favorite instructor of the older course, Brian Winn. I really can't overstate how engaging and entertaining he makes learning.
Game Design and Development with Unity 2020
Offered by Michigan State University. Launch Your Career in Game Design and Development. Learn the theory and practice of game making using ... Enroll for free.
www.coursera.org
These are fully fledged college courses that start from the very beginning with absolutely no assumptions about your skill level other than you can turn on a computer and use a mouse; this includes no prior experience with coding.
These are, in principle, paid courses (either on their own or as part of Coursera's subscription model), but there's a handy option to audit them for free. To do this, you need to click on each individual course (rather than the specialization), then click the "Enroll for Free" button (which will take you to a "try 7 days for free), then look for a tiny hyperlink at the very bottom (you may need to scroll down) that says "Audit the course". This will let you access all of the course materials for free without any time limit; you just don't get the exams or the certificate at the end.
Pick #2: Official Introduction to Unity, featuring the LEGO microgame
A partnership between Unity and LEGO, this brand new, interactive in-editor tutorial walks you through all of its features using a game created explicitly for that purpose, based on the well-known LEGO bricks and minifigures. Our very own member and aptly named GoldHeart has also partnered with Unity to bring you a step-by-step video walkthrough of how to download and use both Unity and the tutorial itself!
Feel free to post about your experiences with either (or both) of these courses, and don't be afraid to ask for help if you get stuck, too. :)
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