Teaching Game Development To Fine Arts Students?

jkavalier writes "I've been asked to prepare a short course (50 hours) of video game development to Fine Arts students. That means people with little-to-no technical skills, and hopefully, highly creative individuals. By the end of it, I would like to have finished 1-3 very basic minigames. I'm considering Unity 3D, Processing, and even Scratch. How would you approach teaching such a course? What do you think is the best tool/engine/environment for such a task?"

As with so many courses

[guruevi]

and nobody seems to understand it - you shouldn't teach programs, you should teach techniques and principals to be applied in lab sessions. I don't know what arts students are doing in game development. If anything, the only thing they should be developing is artwork.

You can use anything to teach them how to design something, I would suggest Blender (since it's free and they are ART students) or if they are technically adept enough (which they aren't), you can let them use the Sauerbraten engine and I believe you can get the Unreal engine free as an educational institution. If you have to get really simplistic and only teach them how their art works out in games, use HTML5 or *shudder* Flash, for something bigger you can use the Doom engine (very simple to design for) and let them make some artwork for it.

WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

...ugh, I think maybe you shouldn't be teaching them?

Re:I would approach teaching that course...

[Gotung]

Clearly the goal isn't to turn some art student into the next Carmack. But development teams need artists, and don't you think giving those artists some basic understanding of how 3D games are built would help them do their jobs?

Fine-arts + programming = ?

[chemicaldave]

Stick with the broader aspects of game design such as: story development, character development, gameplay, flow. I would be hesitant to throw "fine-arts" students into programming. If you must, however, I have no advice.

Re:As with so many courses

[frosty_tsm]

In fact, if they are really good at arts, they should do only arts, with a tools like 3D Studio Max, Maya, etc. Again, arts only, no programming.

This is pretty narrow pigeon-holing. There is no reason why an artist who may one day work with those tools shouldn't also know game-design principles (especially if they will one day be a key member on a game project).

Should I as a software engineer not touch Apache configuration because I am best at writing code? What about database scripts?

"Technical"

[DoofusOfDeath]

To be fair, many of them may have highly developed technical skills. But their tools may be paint brushes, pianos, or their own bodies.

It's probably more accurate to say they don't have much computer technical skills.

Re:"Technical"

[tverbeek]

Don't assume that fine arts students today lack computer skills. Many do, and some just don't have the left-brains for it, but there are a lot of artists out there with an excellent understanding of computer technology. You can't get a BFA at most art schools these days without using a computer... sometimes a lot.

Re:As with so many courses

[Rhacman]

I'd add that it isn't even just that the artist might one day end up programming, they may never write a single line of code professionally and still benefit from having an understanding of the basic principles to software development. Having an appreciation of how the software works may help the artist appreciate the limitations to what they can create. Perhaps the artist would like to use a certain special graphical effect for an object. It may turn out that this effect isn't natively supported by 3d libraries or modern video hardware and would require special coding that may have considerable performance implications. Ultimately, the software team will be the ones implementing this code and judging if the performance cost is within budget for the scene but in these discussions it is helpful if there is some overlap of knowledge on both sides of the table.

Speaking from experience...

[Anonymous Coward]

I taught a Flash ActionScript class at an art school once.

Tell them to save their creativity for their artwork, and not their variable names.

They are going to be overwhelmed, both by the left brained and "only one right answer" discipline required to get code to run properly.

I would keep it VERY simple. More than you think is necessary.

You might just lose some students entirely. It's been said that programmers do for love what others wouldn't do for money. You will soon find out just how true this is.

At the end of my class, the students really did seem to appreciate it and had learned a lot. However, you are not going to turn them into professional programmers in this amount of time. I would focus on just giving them a sampler platter of the kinds of things they would need to consider if they were working on a project like this with a programmer, especially as it pertains to art.

The best you can hope for is that it will spark someone's interest and they'll want to find out more outside of class.

Re:I would approach teaching that course...

[Squapper]

To be a successful artist in game development you need a sturdy technical foundation. No need to be a engineer, but you definitly need to be a geek and have a strong passion for games.

I have been a game developing 3d-artist for many years, and i'd rather hire a geek that became an artist than a "fine artist" that learned to do 3d.

3D artist

[poly_pusher]

Being a 3D artist with a fine arts background, if you are trying to teach artist basic elements of game design, I think it would be best to pair an artist with a comp sci major. The comp sci major can handle many of the technicalities of getting content into a game. Most artists who lack a technical background are going to be intimidated just by the process of creating assets and learning how to use the software necessary and the various requirements of doing so. The benefit for the comp sci major is insight in to how to communicate with artist. If they go into gaming they WILL be frustrated by the flakey, flighty artists. Understanding how to cope with them in a future professional environment will be very useful.

I wouldn't necessarily focus on finishing actual games. Focus on finishing assets. You'll be surprised at how excited these artists will be just seeing the helmet, gun or whatever they made show up in a level that will cement their interest in game content creation and will be a much better focus for a 50 hour course. I would also recommend the Unreal 3 engine if possible. That way, they are more likely to continue learning from what you taught them well after the class is over. They can skin a head for a game they have at home. Geeking out is an understatement regarding what their reaction will be to that. "That's mine, and it's in the game engine used for Gears of War!"

After that they'll have an interest and incentive to take it further and more technical, things like scripting, etc.

Re:As with so many courses

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, if they are really good at arts, they should do only arts, with a tools like 3D Studio Max, Maya, etc. Again, arts only, no programming.

You are obviously not an expert in the field and I don't think anyone really expect you to fully understand what art is. One thing that I think you would benefit from is to consider that art can be a lot more than just an image. For example sound could be a vital part of art.
Tools like 3D Studio and Maya are very specific and if the artist want to create something that is beyond those tools it can be necessary for him/her to be able to program.
Some might even consider computer programs by itself to be an art. A program that calculates more than 50 digits of PI have very little use beyond what could be called art.

The 256 byte piece of machine code for dos that is listed in hex to the left in this image [iquilezles.org] could not really be considered as anything else than art and the moving images it creates is also art. (Note that I consider the code by itself to be art but you need to disassemble it and see what it does to understand it.)

Forget About Games - Think Levels

[Plekto]

The title pretty much says it all. People in art don't program games at all. They instead get hired to do levels and art for them. I'd just take a basic game that's well understood and have them make their own custom levels for it.

Game Development or Computer Game Programming?

[HawaiianToast]

It sounds like you want to teach computer game programming to me. If you really want to just teach game development maybe you should develop a pen & paper game. They can write the rule book. Otherwise you're teaching two things and maybe nobody will learn much of either.

Re:As with so many courses

[Macgrrl]

As a slightly different take, I would be giving them a couple of stacks of index cards and focusing on the concepts of story flow, decision trees, character interactions, pacing, types of encounters - the bits that constitute game mechanics rather than just another course on how to program/use an application. The principle isn't that different from how websites used to be mocked up on paper to understand the pathing and wire frames before you started coding it.