Game development for beginners

October 16, 2006 — Daniel Livingstone

Via MCV, I read a letter posted by Jacob Habgood - his site has a strangely familiar title to it... gamelearning.net. While he talks a lot about games-based learning, his activity is actually in games-development based learning - and indeed he co-authored the Gamemaker book with Mark Overmars. A recent article by Jacob can be found on gamasutra: Compulsory game development for everyone.

Its looks like quite a nice wee article, but I had to smile at the photo caption on the second page, “I bet he doesn’t look that engrossed in his English lessons”, given the fantastic quote I repeated in the last entry in this blog about students having to be told not to leave recess early to get back to their book-writing!

Posted in Game Development Based Learning, Games Based Learning.

2 Responses to “Game development for beginners”

  1. Sandra Dickinson Says:
    November 7, 2006 at 5:42 pm

    Reading this post (now a little less than a month ago) is what really got me going on “learning by MAKING a game” (as opposed to learning by playing a game).

    So, since then, I have set up a wiki: http://selearninggames.wikispaces.com.

    Selearninggames is a wikispace for social entrepreneurs to make a learning game together that will solve the mystery of nonprofit earned income venture profitability.

    What’s the game? It’s making the game!

    The meta-patterns that solve the mystery of profitability are hidden in the collective experience of social entrepreneurs. Discovering patterns is what makes learning fun! During the collaborative process of making the game, we will explore our common problems, and common solutions will emerge. Our tacit knowledge (stuff we don’t know that we know) becomes explicit.

    As we apply, test and refine together, the most effective set of solutions become the meta-patterns accelerating profitability for our own ventures. These meta-patterns become the design principles of the game we make.

    It’s free. Anyone can easily edit pages, upload files, join in our discussion, and help make the game.

    Any comment you (Bill, Tony, … ;) have on how I have set up the ‘game-making’ experience so far would be so much appreciated. Thank you.

  2. Daniel Livingstone Says:
    November 7, 2006 at 8:32 pm

    Hi Sandra,

    wow thats pretty cool… and worthy I think of me making a new post on this, after I get a chance to look over selearninggames!

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