jonbho

A few months ago, I was discussing new opportunities over Skype with Jean-Paul Boodhoo from Develop with Passion® fame. He came up with an intriguing concept I wouldn’t have thought of: why not offer developers from different backgrounds a hyper-intensive bootcamp on games development? A one-week bootcamp at that? And have developers who have no background in games programming become actual game developers n one week?

See, JP has been teaching greatly successful bootcamps on advanced development techniques for years. Over 1,000 students across the globe can attest to the efficiency of such a course – feedback often ranges from “amazing” to “life-changing”. The concept is great: you set everything up at a hotel or similar venue, and decide to dedicate EVERYTHING during 5 days to transmitting the relevant knowledge. Days last 12 hours or more. The idea is that people should leave everything aside, and put all their effort into advancing to the next level in their software development skills and careers. With a passionate and experienced instructor, and focused and motivated students, it can truly be an amazing learning experience.

JP suggested that with my games background, it could be an interesting idea to offer such a course, to teach games development to developers from other fields. With JP’s experience in setting up such courses successfully, and my knowledge of games development, we could provide something incredibly valuable that hasn’t be available before. This meshed up nicely with a lifelong interest of mine, which is teaching. Back in the day, I taught an assembly-language programming course online, and then turned it into a book, actually, the book I would have liked to have when I was learning assembly language myself. Then, I’ve taught courses several times, and starting last year, I have been directing a Master’s degree in games development in a new high-end university in Madrid.

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Plane tickets to Austin, TX: purchased. Macbook Air: loaded up. Hotel: booked. Instructions to students on how to prepare their laptops: sent. All cool Windows & OS X example code: up and running. Everything ready for Gamecrash on February 18th!

Here are some screenshots from the samples you will be coding during the course (the first ones, I’ll post more advanced ones in a few days) (and of course you will have creative freedom to do your own variation of these!):

Spaceships. OpenGL graphics. Simple “C without pointers” so that we can focus on programming games instead of neverending mumbo-jumbo. Bubbles. OpenAL audio. Game physics. Bouncy balls. Characters walking, jumping, shooting. Keyboard and mouse-based controls. Zombies. AI. Worlds and levels. Explosions. Graphics effects. What else can you ask for?

There are still seats available, if you want to learn games development in the best way possible and in the shortest amount of time, you should definitely join here! (All the course details here.)

I’m enjoying incredibly programming all these minigames. Even more so doing it in this refreshing, simplified C. It is an incredibly valuable language for learning, and it also feels like getting rid of a lot of cruft and going back to the really valuable roots!

PS: Graphics courtesy of the following artists: Tyrian and other graphics by Daniel Cook (http://www.lostgarden.com/), Fuzed graphics by Marc Russell (http://www.spicypixel.net), Zombie sprites by Clint Bellanger (http://opengameart.org/content/zombie-sprites). Thanks guys!