RobertoDillon Game Designer, Author & Professor
Links
Program
Across the years, I had the privilege to teach game design and development to many gifted students who later became successful professionals, including IGF finalists and developers now working in AAA studios like Ubisoft or Bungie, top grossing companies like King and several other small and large studios alike around the world.
I believe game development is a terrific tool to learn programming, logical thinking, HCI, UX and many other skills that can be applied in many different domains, not just games and that's why I love teaching it so much. This page is a work in progress where I am going to share some resources that should help get you started if you are an aspiring developer.
Ideally, some day I'd like to start different online courses where we could interact a little more closely. When this happens, you will find more information and any relevant link here.
For the time being, let's start with some free resources for game development. First of all, I'd recommend beginners to start with HTML5 for ease of use and portability reasons (an overview of the many engines and frameworks availble can be found at html5gameengine.com) then, for getting ready-to-use assets in your own games, the following are a good starting point:
Graphics
· HasGraphics - hasgraphics.com : includes some very nice tile sets and sprite sheets.
· Mayang's Free Textures - mayang.com/textures : a huge collection of more than 4300 high quality textures
· Open Game Art - opengameart.org : an excellent website featuring tons of free sprites and textures suitable for many game genres. It also has a section for music and sound effects.
· PV Games - pioneervalleygames.com/free-resources.html : tiles and sprite sheets suitable for RPG and adventure games
Music / SFX
· Free Music Archive - freemusicarchive.org : free downloads under Creative Commons and other licenses of music across many genres.
· Free Sound Project - freesound.org : a huge database of creative commons licensed sounds.
· Open Music Archive - openmusicarchive.org : a collaborative project to source, digitize and distribute out-of-copyright sound recordings
· SFX Source - sfxsource.com : a great collection of professional quality SFX, including also royalty free music.
· SFXR - drpetter.se/project_sfxr.html : simply of the best little freeware tools ever!
To conclude, some "golden rules" for success: never stop experimenting, never stop learning and, most important, never stop having fun with what you do!