Paul Kaiser's Blog

This year I’m relaunching goodlearning.com with a narrower focus. Goodlearning users will focus their creative learning around specific beginning-to-end game projects. Every project begins with the game concept, requirements, and other design considerations. Then each project ends with a completed project — with each users’ personal flair to boot.

What about breaking the rules?

Most folks tell you businesses should be designed to:

1. Scale: the business can handle a large amount of new activity while adding only a small amount of new expenses / resources.
2. Run Without You: the business should be able to run with or without you, the founder.

Why break the rules?

I totally understand scale and “working on your business, not in it.” However, Goodlearning.com is something I want to do more than anything else. At this point, I want to provide nearly individual attention to each student as I can.

This morning, as I considered what game mechanics the site should use to encourage users to keep moving forward, I decided I want to “validate” certain steps students take. At different milestones during game projects, students can upload the work they did for a lesson (a starship sprite, for instance) and I’ll “validate” that item. This gives them additional points specific to validated exercises. It also gives me a chance to keep on board with each student’s learning. I won’t be grading their work, per se, but if I see they are not on the right track I can offer some assistance.

Completely bonkers

So, if I get 1,000 students — a goal for 2012 — and only half of them submit items for validation — I’m going to be one busy beaver! I am considering options for allowing more senior students to do validation, but that’s thinking way too far ahead.

Level up your creative technical skills

Anyway, if you want to learn creative technical skills while having a great time, keep your eyes on goodlearning.com. I’ll try launching a kickstarter.com project soon to get some funding I need, and after that you can sign up and get moving.

Have you ever been plugging away at your favorite video game and wished you could create such a world on your own? I’ve always been that way. When I was a kid, playing:

• Gauntlet
• Galaga
• Robotron

…and the like, I’d work away hours on my computers trying to build similar games. Whether it was the:

• Tandy CoCo
• Commodore 64
• or the library’s Apple II

…I loved the power to dream up a world and then build it in an interactive space others could play around with.

You’ve come a long way, baby

I’ve recently been finishing a multi-player Gauntlet-inspired game titled “Repossessed.” I was amazed at how many more options aspiring game developers have these days. I developed variants of Repossessed in:

• TNTBasic for the Mac
• RealStudio / RealBasic for the Mac and Windows
• GameMaker for Windows

Those are just the ones I spent time on. Many more open source game development tools exist, and many are open source and free of charge.

GameMaker is a great place to start

Ultimately, I settled on GameMaker. I know, it’s not open source, but it is the best free and low-cost option for rapid game development. If the only thing you download is GameMaker, the tutorials, and sample sounds and icons, you can still make a good game. You don’t need to divide your learning efforts amongst separate graphics, animations, music, and sound applications before you get started.

GameMaker’s author has been generous to the community for years, publishing the highly-capable free version of GameMaker alongside the ridiculously-low priced $25 Pro version. And, he hasn’t stopped there. Version 7 of GameMaker has a build for Mac, and in the works as I type this is the ability to compile games for HTML5 web delivery!

Come learn with me

GameMaker has decent tutorials, a good book called “Game Maker’s Apprentice,” and a large online community. However, I haven’t yet seen a comprehensive, straightforward, step-by-step, friendly, consistent learning resource outside of the author’s own classes. Typically, some online tutorials spring up and are soon abandoned, after offering only intermediate and advanced-level materials. For the beginner wanting a guide, there’s not an obvious route to take.

Homeschooling course

As soon as flag football coaching is over in mid October, I plan to teach game development from the ground up to our local homeschooling group. Materials will probably be suitable for ages 12 and up, but anyone willing to pay attention can give it a whirl. All you’ll need is a Mac or Windows computer and access to the internet.

Online learning for everyone

Each topic covered in the game development course will start with a screencast everyone can view before we get together in person for discussion. In addition, I’m going to use the excellent “p2 theme” for WordPress to make a team chat area where we can all learn from one another. As rapid as this course may move along, I think this style of online communication will work better than the common bulletin board system.

I said “everyone”

Oh, one more thing. There’s no reason these materials need to be exclusive to our homeschooling group. I’ll make these lessons suitable for anyone to tackle, even if you can’t meet in person. The screencasts and team chat area will be available on my open source learning site goodlearning.com by November. Screencasts will be closed-captioned, as well.

I’m excited. I hope some of you are, too. That’s all I have to say about that.