Daily Deal: School Of Game Design

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

Love gaming? Want to build your own games? The School of Game Design is the place to start. With courses for developers of all skill levels led by expert instructors, The School of Game Design helps you learn game development and design at your own pace, giving you access to an enormous library of step-by-step training videos. From the absolute basics to performing advanced techniques with Unity3D, and much more. It's on sale for only $59 for unlimited access.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: daily deal


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  1. identicon
    Rekrul, 29 Mar 2018 @ 5:45pm

    Modern game design 101:

    1. Control configuration is completely optional and unnecessary. Just set the controls the way you like and everyone else will love them. In particular, nobody in the world plays first person games with inverted vertical aim anymore, so make sure not to include an invert option.

    2. Always hard-code your game for widescreen resolutions. After all, everyone in the world now has a widescreen display.

    3. Make sure that your game is in permanent tutorial mode so that it always tells the user what button to press and when to press it. Modern gamers are too dumb to remember complicated controls, like pressing "X" to interact with everything. Also make sure that it outlines everything that can be interacted with in bright, neon colors so that the user can't possibly miss them.

    4. If your game tells a story, it shouldn't go more than 30 seconds, 60 at most, before having a lengthy, unskippable cutscene. Always use cutscenes for anything out of the ordinary that the player's character has to do, such as setting off an explosion, sliding down a ramp or diving out of a window. After all, it's more fun to watch the computer do it for you than to actually do it yourself. Besides always remember that "games" should be a cinematic experience first and that the gameplay is secondary.

    5. Include lots of quicktime events, gamers LOVE those!

    6. Never include a manual save option, only checkpoints. Gamers will appreciate having to replay tough sections of the game over and over.

    7. Only include the base game and make all the rest DLC. Gamers will appreciate the extra content more if they have to pay for it.

    8. Include intrusive online-based DRM. It really won't protect your game from being pirated, but it will give the impression that you're a serious game designer.

    9. Don't waste time having people test your game on a wide range of systems, just give it to a few friends and then release it if it mostly works for them. Your paying customers won't mind being beta testers. In fact, they'll probably enjoy getting a behind the scenes look at the development process and they'll appreciate the finished product more if they help to perfect it.

    10. Don't bother to include an ending to your game. Just a simple "You Won!" message is enough. Finishing the game is reward enough. In fact, just have the game start over from the beginning.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    Muser, 30 Mar 2018 @ 3:30am

    Very interesting article to read. Thanks for sharing your views.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 30 Mar 2018 @ 6:22am

    Re:

    What's with these bots from India on here lately? Obvious attempt to boost search engine results, judging by the link in the username.

    *sigh*

    Time to flag another one.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 30 Mar 2018 @ 6:27am

    Re:

    Hahaha, laughed my ass off to that one.

    Regarding #4, what I hate is that these cutscenes are *unpausable*. I have to pee, damn it!

    #10 actually worked back when games were difficult enough that beating them felt like its own reward. I still haven't beaten Battletoads to this day and I really won't care if the ending sucks, I'll just be happy to cross that off my list before I die.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  5. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 30 Mar 2018 @ 6:28am

    Wait a minute, is that a Game Gear in that picture?!?!

    link to this | view in thread ]

  6. identicon
    Rekrul, 2 Apr 2018 @ 6:36pm

    Re: Re:

    Regarding #4, what I hate is that these cutscenes are unpausable. I have to pee, damn it!

    I often wish that in addition to skipping cutscenes (I've seen them once, I don't need to see them every time I die and it reloads a checkpoint), you could pause them, or even rewind them. Sometimes I see something cool and I'd like to see it again, but don't want to sit through the entire cutscene for it.

    #10 actually worked back when games were difficult enough that beating them felt like its own reward. I still haven't beaten Battletoads to this day and I really won't care if the ending sucks, I'll just be happy to cross that off my list before I die.

    That one was inspired by the PSP game The Treasures of Montezuma. It's a Candy Crush style game and when you finish all the levels, all it says is congratulations, now try the game in hard mode, and it starts over. Except that "hard mode" doesn't seem any different. If you beat all the levels again, it just starts over. The thing is that it starts over from the first level as if you started a new game, so not only do you not have the benefit of the upgrades you chose, the first few levels are ridiculously easy again.

    Games don't need to have long, elaborate endings, but maybe a pretty image, or a short screen of text telling you something interesting would be nice.

    And I wouldn't even oppose DLC so much if you could actually back it up in a way that it could be re-installed in the future without the need to re-download it or re-activate it. If you buy a game on disc, you can use that disc for the rest of your life, provided that you have a working console to use it on. If you're "buying" DLC, it should be the same. As I understand it, the limited backup options that exist only allow you to restore that content to the same console. If it dies and you replace it, all the stuff you thought you backed up is useless.

    link to this | view in thread ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.