I have a question for all of you working in the game development community. If YOU were teaching computer graphic animation at a college level, and as part of the program you wanted to offer an introduction to game development course, what engine would you recommend be used for the course? Keep in mind that it is an introductory course (learning curve should not be climbing a steep mountain), but would hopefully also provide a foundation that would ultimately be useful to students who decided to go into the game creation business. Thanks! I can't wait to hear what the recommendation is from people actually in the industry, rather than sales people.

Flash, probably. It's simple to learn and apply to nontrivial games, yet powerful enough to keep a class busy for well over a semester. Flash is used fairly often in casual games, and the programming and design concepts are applicable to all game development.

As a side note: A class called "Introduction to game development" is a little like "Introduction to science"... it's rather vague and overbroad, treating a variety of related but distinct disciplines as one thing. The fact that it's part of a "computer graphic animation" track suggests that you're more interested in the design side than the programming side, but that's just my assumption... knowing more about the program would help in recommending things.

Thanks. Indeed Flash is already being taught. This particular course would focus on realtime 3d games and would feature design as a large component. We would prefer not to HAVE to create a FPS, and would probably hope to find an engine that would allow for modification of style of gameplay (?). The idea is to expose students to things like poly counts, texture limitations, incorporating character animation and environments in an engine, etc., and give them an opportunity to put those learned skills to use in a project. I hope that helps.

I heard some good stuff about the Torque game engine and they seem to have a special educational pricing, too:

http://www.garagegames.com/solutions/education/

Hi Holodecker.

You have a couple of options. If you want a full blown engine that is used commercially Gamebryo has free academic licenses. they will even have a seminar for college professors http://www.emergent.net/academicworkshop check into their academic program. This is a full blown commercial solution with every possible extra that you can think, the graphics are Unreal Engine 3+ level.

If you are looking for an open source, simple (5.000 lines of code), next-gen game engine, OpenGL 2.x shader based engine, (in a couple of years all new engines will be shader based). Then http://www.Horde3D.org is your best bet. If you want a quick overview you can check out my latest blog entry http://danielmd.net

Good luck in your hunt.

Exactly how much programming experience, in which languages, will students have going in to this class?

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Really, I would just recommend making them as comfortable and productive as possible in Maya. That's where they're going to spend most of their time on the job. If it's an animation course, forget about poly counts and textures - the modelers will worry about that, not the animators. Teach them how to create great animations, and how to learn about the tech about how their animations are represented, compressed, etc. They can learn to constrain their content once they become competent in creating it and have a big-picture understanding of how it all works.

I would recommend Gamebryo too. It's got great exporters for Maya and 3DS Max, is currently in use by many "next gen" games (i.e. it's relevant), and I hear they do discounts for educational use.

Hi,

I'd like to recommend Panda3D (Disney uses it), mainly cuz it is free and it is used in some games. U can code it from c++ or python (with IronPython u can use it from any .net language).

My second recommodation would be XNA, mainly cuz it is simple (with a bit programming background u can master it in less than a month) and students get almost all developer tools from ms (VS2005/8 pro, etc) for free.

Horde3D (mainly graphics but simple to integrate with physics engine like ageia physx or other components) and Irrlicht, are worth mentioning too.

For educational matters of course it might be better to just build an engine from the scratch, this gives a much better insight into the topics of engine design.

I heared big businesses use Unreal engine or bryo.

[Edited by - Noob_Skywalker on April 7, 2008 1:27:59 AM]