Like JohnnyCode said, sign up with Autodesk for free education software.

http://www.autodesk.com/education/free-software/featured

1. Free (~Yes)

2. Doesn't take up too much memory (~Yeah [Worried look on face.])

3. Easy to learn (Um... ~Yes [Fingers crossed behind back.])

4. Cool graphics (like 3d) (Yes)

5. Allows for artistic creativity (Yes)

6. Connects to the field (i.e. recognized as a valuable skill by game schools and companies). (Very Yes)

Thanks. Have you used any of it?

pedagogical

I admit, I had to look that word up.

The question is, I guess, can I get by with macbook laptops running with only 4gb?

Reminds me of Alex Peake.

(Might as well ask.) Are you Alex Peake?

Never heard of him.

And that's fine. The point being made was that, unlike other subjects, "picking up the basics" isn't that simple with video game development - it basically means investing months to years of study and practice, with the amount required heavily depending on what the desired level of proficiency is. Hence why I asked.

Have you used any of it?

A free version of 3Ds Max is news to me. It's the premier tool for game development. I didn't want to spend the money on 3Ds Max, so instead I've been using Blender 3D.

The latest version of Blender 3D is for Mac OSX 64 Bit. I don't know Jacque about Mac, but if you need 32 Bit, you can browse for an earlier version of Blender 3D here.

Never heard of him.

You've never heard of Alex Peake!? He is legendary!

You may consider him to be, 'pedagogical'.

And he too, was lured by the Mac side.

So, not sure if this has been asked in this thread, what part of the 'design' are you teaching?

Are you teaching "Level Design"?

Or "Character Design"?

Or the design of the game mechanics?

Everything falls under Design, but the field is vastly different. The discussion of which game engine to use seems to focus more on building games than designing games, as Tom Sloper had pointed out.

I don't teach and haven't taught game design, nor would I call myself a professional game designer, but I feel like teaching game designs can be conceived using table-top mechanics, e.g pen/paper, rules of games, cards, turns, etc. In other words, teaching students how to design a game such that every player has equal chance of winning even though someone has to make the first turn. How to design a game such that player would feel like it can beat the game even though draw of cards/dice is random.

As I have alluded to, I plan to teach the concepts first, through whatever form makes the most sense (board games, card games, whatever). Then I will work on students learning the software, probably teach a couple of programs over the course of the year and culminate with students being able to design and present their own games.

Well, you see, that's the thing. *Video* game development is a completely separate headache. It's a process that involves people from different skill sets working together for a few months/years, going through the ups and downs of project development, and the end result of that is the game. I just can't image any student would be able to put their "design" into a fully playable game within a few months. At best, the students would make games that already exist, e.g. match-3, tetris, breakout, with tiny variations.

You would spend your time going through how to use the software, how to write code, how to enable collision detection, how to set that one flag hidden inside the software, how to debug, etc. etc. All of which has nothing to do with design.

That doesn't really teach them about design, does it? It just teaches them about game development and its process.

I won't say I'm not a little intimidated about the software, but if other non-programmer/non-video game people have been able to teach it, so can I.

The question remains, though, what will you teach?

Please understand, we want to help.

Several people in this discussion, including one who happens to be a full-time professor at a major university teaching game design and game project management, have come back to the very important issue of curriculum in the thread. (I'll leave you to figure out who it is that's the teacher.) Several contributors in the thread have written books used in college courses. So please, the distinction about what exactly you are trying to teach is very important.

We want to help, but it seems communication is difficult.

However, I would question your understanding of education and pedagogy. I don't understand where your negative attitude about my approach is coming from.

Much of it comes from the terms you are using. Imagine a budding photographer coming up to you and describing how he dislikes the bokeh of a photo and showing it you see no depth-of-field effects at all. The student continues to state just how badly the bokeh bothers them, but looking at the photo again and again you see no bokeh effect at all. You may question for the student to point exactly what he means by bokeh, only to have the student indicate the purple banding of chromatic aberrations. Similarly with other words, perhaps confusing tone and value, or confusing subject and composition.

The words you are saying are valid in their own right, but you seem to have interchanged several of them in ways that are nonsensical to those in the field.

You say with words you want one thing, but you describe with links that you want something different.

Many schools and teachers say "game design" when they mean "game programming", or "level design". Many who teach "game design" instead teach an introduction on how to use the tools but never actually reach discussion on design itself.

Game development is a broad collection of everything related to games. Programming, art, animation, UI, UX, game design, level design, audio, QA, marketing, production, management, and many other enormous topics fall here. If it is related to developing games, it falls under the industry-wide game development umbrella.

Game design is a broad field, but has very little to do with programming games, viewing games on a screen, or actually building games. Game design studies topics like balance, making not perfectly-balanced games but perfectly-imbalanced games where everything has strengths and weaknesses to each other. Topics like analyzing the psychology of fun, what makes something fun and why, or how to trigger and build emotions in players. Topics like how to build numeric systems with interplay between each other, much like the Dungeons and Dragons manuals, with the interplay between monster families and world items and weapons and character traits.

Level design and world design are a subset of game design focusing on the environments of the games. These have an enormous impact on the game. Horror games with their tightly confined spaces; shooter games with levels of carefully designed obstacle courses allowing for sniper holes that are never fully protected, choke points, open fields of death that must be crossed yet can be strategically defended; playground games with vivid colors, yet balanced so important items are clearly visible among the bright and beautiful world. Platform games that slowly teach you how the world works and gradually moves from a simple platform and simple pit into later levels that require dexterity and skill to cross. Puzzle levels and worlds that need to be solvable by all players from all backgrounds around the globe, tricky enough to present a thought-provoking challenge, but not so difficult as to stump anyone from any culture at any age in your demographic.

Game programming relies on the tools like GameSalad and Unity mentioned above. It is the source code, the math functions, the computer code that ties everything up. As you wrote that you have an art background this seems the least likely thing for you to be teaching, yet it was the first thing in the conversation about what you wanted to teach.

Game art comes in many flavors. UI art is typically 2D and Photoshop is the current dominant program. Concept art is often 2D, again with Photoshop high on the chart but with several other artistic programs being popular in sub-groups, such as Manga Studio for concept art in its style. 3D models have many tools available, Maya and ZBrush are quite common with 3D Studio having a heavy following, and Blender showing up from time to time thanks to its cost.

Game animation is an art discipline but often treated separate from the other arts above. 3D animation tools have an overlap with some art tools, Maya and 3D Studio being quite common. 2D animation tools are the drawing tools rather than rig manipulation, but as an art teacher you probably get that.

Game tools, game engines, and game content pipelines are the tools, software, and other machinations forming the hoops to jump through to turn a collection of images, scripts, code, sound clips, and other materials into a full-fledged game.

All of these can be taught, but each are enormous disciplines on their own.

So the question remains... What are you trying to teach?

You posted several links to student-built projects built with Flash, GameStar, GameSalad, and other tools. Those tools are not focused on game design, but are instead focused first on game programming and secondarily on basic level design.

You posted links to the top game engines, Unreal, Unity, CryEngine, etc. While these tools have some of the games pipeline as it relates to art, getting art assets like models and animations into a world, or building levels using their tools, they are primarily the realm of programming, and secondarily world design, and only marginally game design as the interactions and numbers created by designers are tweaked and twiddled.

Perhaps the most powerful tool available to game designers are the text editor and the spreadsheet.

You are not the first, nor will you be the last, to miss that.

Pure game design can probably best be taught by immersing the students in Dungeons and Dragons, card games like Magic the Gathering and Yu Gi Oh, and video clips and level maps from hundreds of games.

Though the students may learn much about designing a game, they are unlikely to come out of the class feeling unfulfilled by not having developed a game.

Your posts seem to indicate that as well. While you state you want to teach game design, you indicate differently that you want to teach a shallow introduction to game development across most disciplines.

Since you linked to successfully completed games by student, a broad game development across all disciplines, my hunch is that game design is probably the smallest aspect of the course that you will teach that age group. You will probably start with the basics of the tools you will use, then start with the content pipeline for getting art and animation in the game, quickly build up some simple levels. Then off to programming to give them the ability to bind the pieces into something useful. Then will be iteration on all of those, the content pipeline, tool usage, and programming, until they are able to actually construct something that holds their interest. Only after those skills have been developed are you likely to actually get into the barest fundamentals of design, of the psychology of play, of the understanding of emotion and fun, of balance and imbalance, of building precept upon precept, on crafting designs that can be reused, on building a small number of carefully crafted parts that are easily understood and enable depth of play.

And that's fine. The point being made was that, unlike other subjects, "picking up the basics" isn't that simple with video game development - it basically means investing months to years of study and practice, with the amount required heavily depending on what the desired level of proficiency is. Hence why I asked.

I won't say I'm not a little intimidated about the software, but if other non-programmer/non-video game people have been able to teach it, so can I.

Even though this is high school level, you still need to teach beyond what the students can pick up themselves. If that's the way other teachers/educators are teaching game development(or game design) then its seriously sub-standard (you may and other educators may not believe this... the students may be enjoying themselves.. they may be producing images, clips and animation that wows you.... but these things that wows you are probably nothing. And you don't know this because you only know basics yourself,... don't know that they are just few button clicks, mouse-moves and the software does the rest. They need to learn beyond this otherwise It is substandard).

What other subject can you treat this way. Can you as a teacher only know and teach the basics of physics, chemistry, maths, biology (without having thorough in-depth knowledge in these subjects yourself) and let the students pick up the rest? How would you mark or access their work? How would you solve technical problems they have? Oh you are saying game development is different ? Well that's you and other teachers being seriously naive.

Students always learn better when, in addition to the hands-on work, they theoretically learn the workings of the inner mechanics of the development process (albeit in a mild way since this is only high school). And that is what you teachers are supposed to teach them.

Since you insists, then you and other teachers this way teaching this way are really misunderstanding what game-development is and you should know that it is substandard. Of course you can start (and the others continue) teaching this way, but don't call the class game development class, rather call it kids playing around class.

Thanks for all the time and input you guys are putting into this thread. I really appreciate it and I hope that as I start actually building the course and my questions become more specific, you all may feel less frustrated by my lack of knowledge on the subject. Let's try it this way. I am going to give you a list of tasks and objectives for building the course. Tell me what you would advise at each level and/or what I may be missing, and/or alternative approaches. Maybe then we'd get somewhere. There have been some posts here though that have helped.

On another note, when I have the course developed, it may seem substandard to certain people in the industry, but you have to ask yourself what's worse: teaching the subject with certain components missing, incomplete or extremely basic, or not offering the course at all. There have to be compromises. Whatever we can offer at the high school level is SOMETHING, which can get students started on an exploration beyond high school.

So here are the steps I'm considering:

1. Collect curricular ideas and lessons from high school teachers already teaching the subject (game design/development).

2. Look at college-level curriculum and syllabi to get an idea of what colleges are doing.

3. Read up on theory and practice of game design to understand the field

4. Determine what software I will be using (kept limited to 1 or 2 modeling programs and 1 or 2 game/animation programs).

5. Learn the software on my own to a rudimentary level

6. Start the course with concepts (board and card games, etc.) with units that explore each concept in depth

7. Gradually introduce software and let students play with it to get a feel for how it works

8. Culminate each semester or the school year with games students have designed with the software

As to how original these games will be, I have no idea. It may be that they work with a limited set of predesigned elements to make their own version of something (this seems to be what Scratch and GameStar Mechanic do) or maybe it can look better, like what Game Maker seems to provide. Bottom line on this is that you guys need to look at student work online created by these programs to see what has actually been made to know what students can actually produce in one course (as do I-lol).

What frob said. I couldn't have said it any better.

If what you are teaching is game design, if I were you, I wouldn't focus too much on the software/game tools side. Drop #4 and #5, and move that over toward the end of the curriculum where they get to collaborate with folks from other courses (e.g. programming, art, music).

Here's one thing about game development. There will be some amount of frustration of having to change your code/art when you are changing your design. One advice I gave to my ex coworker who wanted to make his own Hearthstone-like game, "Do it with pen and paper first". He wanted to jump immediately to writing C++ code and all that. He's a software engineer, so naturally he thinks in that direction.

Here's why: Say you have a card that gives "+5 Fire damage". Later you introduce a "burning effect", where monsters lose "-1 HP each turn". A couple of iterations later you realize that "+5 Fire damage" is actually too small and need to be bumped to "+10 Fire damage", and then the question comes how long does the "burning effect" last. Then you start adding a "healing" skill to remove the "burning effect". All of these can be implemented VERY EASILY if you use pen/paper, but can be a very frustrating change once it's in the code. And gee, not to mention the art and animation for those.

Study games that already exist and what makes them interesting. They don't have to be video games. Take Texas Hold'em for example. The game is simple: each player is dealt 2 cards, and 5 communal cards, and those with the highest hands win. That's it. But the betting process and the progress of which the communal cards are shown make the game really interesting. The psychological state the it puts the players into, the timing of the players making the bet, all of these come into play. Please don't see game design as just "make your own game". I mean it is, but academically, it is not.

I'm assuming the educator-friendly programs where you can avoid coding are easy enough to make changes in or have limited options so they are hard to mess up. I do agree that everything should always be done on paper first. I plan to have students working collaboratively and really focusing on process, with a lot of drawing and diagramming. That's how I have always had students work in my art classes, the difference being that they make sketches for final projects and in game design they would be making sketches more to think through issues like what you just raised.

I will be using software. The students are going to want to make video games. That is how we will be promoting the course and that's what will get the students excited.