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Teaching Game Development To Fine Arts Students?
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?"
The Blender Game Engine is actually quite suitable for an introductory game design course, and it has two completely free books written for learning it, plus a huge number of example games and scripts. Almost all of the logic can be scripted with 'logic bricks' (a minor amount of simple python scripts are needed for some typical behaviours).
http://download.blender.org/documentation/gamekit2/
http://download.blender.org/documentation/gamekit1/
Also see Yo Frankie - which shows what a team can accomplish in a short time
http://www.yofrankie.org/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7RRaEvWqJc
Blender itself is now quite easy to create game assets in, and works well as a level editor.
The Game Engine is not exactly cutting edge, but then cutting edge isn't of much benefit for learning game design.
I took a game design/development course as a student at CalArts. Many of the students were from the film program, but we also had some musicians, sound designers, and theater kids. Many of the students came into the course with a basic knowledge of programming. Out of that class I saw games developed and completed in Processing, Flash, and Torque.
Another game design class that worked with created two games based on Arduino hardware and Max/MSP. One game incorporated RFID scanners and custom built MP3 players to take players on an audio scavenger hunt. That game received funding from the city arts council and was installed in local mall and again later as part of a city-wide arts festival, the other used video tracking to track players in a physical game arena and has been shown at several Maker Faires and art exhibitions here in LA and Europe.
Many artists I've met are more than capable programmers, and many of them make their art exclusively in coding environments. I would assume that artists taking a game development class would at least be technically minded. The point is that it's probably a mistake to assume that "fine arts" students can't or shouldn't handle more technical work.