The problem that I see with that is, these engines are difficult to do in one class. Generally, learning that is a full two-year program involving programming, logic, math, 3D design, etc. Using 3D engines gets difficult to teach in a 7 week course unless the student already knows quite a bit.
My first programming experiences were actually small games for the TI-83, a humble dream soccer and a bowling game.
PC's were very expensive around '95, a fact which also lead me to take computer science for having access to them at school and obviously, gaming :-) Warcraft, Dune 2, Lost Vikings and the sorts.
After my first job and subsequently, that fascination on developing games faded away under other things like e-commerce, corporate applications and messing with Linux also sinked a large deal of my spare time etc but haven't yet lost hope of finding a way into it.
That brings back some unpleasant memories. When I was a CS undergrad something the professors would enjoy doing was assigning problem sets on the very first lecture of a module that were deliverable by the next lecture (often the next day). I assume it was a mechanism for figuring out people's learning rates.
Of course it was great fun beginning a new term and having 2 or 3 such classes on the first day.
If you really want to learn game development on the web, you should check out http://codehs.com
You learn how to make games that run in HTML5 Canvas using JavaScript, and there are custom libraries that make graphics and user interaction much easier to deal with.
Also, you can take the class at your own pace, so no need to worry about artificial deadlines.
Wow, it seems that they're generating js + canvas games straight from Python (the tool used in the course is http://www.codeskulptor.org/ ). Never heard of it before
In the recent news about the course, a headline reads: "Make a student tutorial video, Win an iPad" (https://class.coursera.org/interactivepython-2012-001/class/...) - Sounds wierd to give a non-programmable device to someone who is following a course on interactive programming. Someone did not get the point.
[+] [-] 10098|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freehunter|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zemanel|13 years ago|reply
My first programming experiences were actually small games for the TI-83, a humble dream soccer and a bowling game.
PC's were very expensive around '95, a fact which also lead me to take computer science for having access to them at school and obviously, gaming :-) Warcraft, Dune 2, Lost Vikings and the sorts.
After my first job and subsequently, that fascination on developing games faded away under other things like e-commerce, corporate applications and messing with Linux also sinked a large deal of my spare time etc but haven't yet lost hope of finding a way into it.
[+] [-] jiggy2011|13 years ago|reply
That brings back some unpleasant memories. When I was a CS undergrad something the professors would enjoy doing was assigning problem sets on the very first lecture of a module that were deliverable by the next lecture (often the next day). I assume it was a mechanism for figuring out people's learning rates.
Of course it was great fun beginning a new term and having 2 or 3 such classes on the first day.
[+] [-] zachgalant|13 years ago|reply
You learn how to make games that run in HTML5 Canvas using JavaScript, and there are custom libraries that make graphics and user interaction much easier to deal with.
Also, you can take the class at your own pace, so no need to worry about artificial deadlines.
[+] [-] nosecreek|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tangue|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stargazer-3|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ekianjo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 10098|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eduardchil|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ichinaski|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VinzO|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtoddh|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eduardchil|13 years ago|reply