Well I got my first section a week ago – Games Developer Introduction, my inital thoughts where I was instantly impressed, the quality of the documentation the data and the tasks was above any academic course I have ever encountered.
So far I have found no bad sides to the way the course progresses through this book, given my skills and knowledge the first section of the book took me around about 3 days in total to complete.
The student world support logins and seminars are top grade the forum help, chat rooms and other students are extremely helpful as well.
The introduction uses a program for the most part called GameMaker 7, for this course you are given the Advanced version of this for free and it takes you through the basics of putting a game together from a simple 2 object game to a multiple object platform game.
There are several games and techniques you learn along the way including some of the more advanced ones like Timelines, Collision detection, Sprite handling and sounds. At first these are dealt with very simply through the GameMaker interface but the more you progress before you know it you are handling more and more of the system yourself, at this point you are actually learning the fundamentals of programming without knowing it you us Events, Loops, Switches, If statements, everything you would expect in a foundation of programming, the GameMaker simple makes this easy to learn and quick to understand.
After I had worked through all the tutorials and examples I had a play around and built my first custom game to play around based on the scrolling shooter game they create with you based on the original 1942 game. I had a play around with sprites graphics sprite control and a myriad of special effects understanding truly what it means to put a game together beyond programming.
So I have handed in my first TMA (Tutor Marked Assignment) and I am awaiting the results… Lets see how I did!
