Advice for Leading & Teaching Game Dev

edited in Questions and Answers
Recently I started 2 Game Development Teams at NMMU.

The 1st group is 2 guys and myself that come together once a week and talk about Game Dev and motivate each other to work on individual small project to we can learn Game Development. Each meeting we set out some objectives we want to achieve in the project each person is working on and then we try to hold each other accountable to complete those tasks each week.

The 2nd group is 3 1st year students that I got to know and that are interested in learning game development. They are really new to game development and had no experience actually making games (or working in a Game Engine). So I established a group (with me as the leader) and I started Guiding them on a Journey to learn Game Development. Since we only started near the end of the 1st semester we didn't really do that much but they are now familiar with the Unity interface and the basic concepts of how a very basic game is made (gave them the Unity Website Roll a Ball Tutorial to do). For this group we decided that we want to focus on creating 2D Games, since I think it would be easier to start off with.

I want to ask your help if you have any tips, ideas or guidance that could help me lead these groups and help them in their journey to learn how to make games. I for one still consider myself as a beginner in game development (have been learning on-and-off for about 2 years now) so this is also an attempt to commit myself to spending regular time learning Game Development and help other like minded individuals, but I still have a lot to learn myself.

Any advice would be much appreciated and if you know of any good Unity 2D Tutorials please let me know. :)

P.S . If there are any other NMMU students that want to join, just give me a private message and we'll get in touch.
Thanked by 2BenJets Kree8

Comments

  • Sounds like you're on a really good path @mkShogun96! Congratulations on getting these teams set up!

    As a good way of helping to keep everyone motivated, a good exercise might be to set up some collaborative blogs/ dev logs that everyone can post to. Members can share what they're wanting to learn week to week, and the little projects they're doing to help them develop those skills. This would be a cool way to track your collective progress, keep yourselve's motivated, and share your journey with other people.

    Good luck for all your future adventures together!
  • Thank you @BenJets for the feedback. That is a very interesting Idea that sound very cool :D maybe a Facebook Group could work? or do you know of a place where I could employ a blog/dev blog?
  • @mkShogun96 You could run a development blog/thread here at MakeGames. It's not exactly a blog format, but this is a good place to get a lot of developer eyes on the progress (and hopefully receive encouragement, and hopefully some useful advice).

    Like what we did for our project "Broforce" : http://makegamessa.com/discussion/118/bro-force-prototype/p1

    I think a Facebook group could work as well, though I personally have less experience there.

    In any case, posting your work publicly is a great suggestion (by @BenJets), I personally find having to post something about a project a useful rewarding mini-deadline. And sharing a collaborative virtual space I think makes a lot of sense.

    It's probably something you've already considered, but I found entering game jams quite motivating when I was starting out. There are quite a lot of jams that happen that aren't confined to tight timeframes (like 48 hour jams). (You can find some here: http://www.indiegamejams.com/ ). I enjoyed game jams for the sense of competition, and also because people involved in game jams tend to check out each others' games, so again more exposure for your work and sometimes some useful feedback.
  • Thank you @EvanGreenwood! One of the goals I set out and said to everyone is that at the end of the Semester I want us to start participating in Game Jams. At the stage the Team is still very very new to Game Development as I am guiding them with Tutorials and "learning Projects". I myself started doing a bit more of 2D Game Dev and I am learning new stuff on my own as well.

    I think it might be a very good Idea to have a thread here for our Team to post progress and mini-projects, we'll just have to come up with a nice Team Name now ;P

    I really appreciate the feedback, thank you for taking the time to reply. :D
  • I agree with Evan, sharing your progress on a thread here is a great way to go.

    If you'd like to repost to another public platform, you have a lot of options. I'm not sure what would work best for you, but these three seem like good ways to go:

    https://medium.com
    https://www.tumblr.com/
    https://wordpress.com/

    I'd advise against facebook, posts on there won't allow you to fully integrate images, gifs or embedded videos, which will likely be very usefully to include in posts.

    Looking forward to seeing what you and the teams get up to going forward!
  • Thank you @Benjets and @EvanGreenwood. I am planning on discussing this at our next meeting this week. Keen to see their reaction and hopefully we can start a thread on MGSA soon ;)

    Again thank you so much for the feedback, it was very valuable :D
    Thanked by 1BenJets
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