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Teaching Game Development To Fine Arts Students?

Posted by timothy on from the I-see-you've-all-brought-your-apples dept.

jkavalier writes "I've been asked to prepare a short course (50 hours) of video game development to Fine Arts students. That means people with little-to-no technical skills, and hopefully, highly creative individuals. By the end of it, I would like to have finished 1-3 very basic minigames. I'm considering Unity 3D, Processing, and even Scratch. How would you approach teaching such a course? What do you think is the best tool/engine/environment for such a task?"

5 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. As with so many courses by guruevi · · Score: 3, Insightful

    and nobody seems to understand it - you shouldn't teach programs, you should teach techniques and principals to be applied in lab sessions. I don't know what arts students are doing in game development. If anything, the only thing they should be developing is artwork.

    You can use anything to teach them how to design something, I would suggest Blender (since it's free and they are ART students) or if they are technically adept enough (which they aren't), you can let them use the Sauerbraten engine and I believe you can get the Unreal engine free as an educational institution. If you have to get really simplistic and only teach them how their art works out in games, use HTML5 or *shudder* Flash, for something bigger you can use the Doom engine (very simple to design for) and let them make some artwork for it.

    --
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  2. WTF by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...ugh, I think maybe you shouldn't be teaching them?

  3. Re:I would approach teaching that course... by Gotung · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Clearly the goal isn't to turn some art student into the next Carmack. But development teams need artists, and don't you think giving those artists some basic understanding of how 3D games are built would help them do their jobs?

  4. Fine-arts + programming = ? by chemicaldave · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Stick with the broader aspects of game design such as: story development, character development, gameplay, flow. I would be hesitant to throw "fine-arts" students into programming. If you must, however, I have no advice.

  5. Game Development or Computer Game Programming? by HawaiianToast · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It sounds like you want to teach computer game programming to me. If you really want to just teach game development maybe you should develop a pen & paper game. They can write the rule book. Otherwise you're teaching two things and maybe nobody will learn much of either.