6 Best Free Online Courses for Game Development and Game Design

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Hi, how are you doing, I hope you’re having an absolutely fantastic day. Today, we are going to talk about the super interesting topic of game designing and game development, and as we all know, good games make us feel happy and relaxed, but it’s not just for entertainment purposes. You’ll be amazed to know that today there are several institutes across the world where young doctors, pilots, drivers and sometimes people, even from the armed forces, use the basics of game designing and game development for their training purposes to improve their reaction time, response time. Obviously, there is a lot of scope in this field.

If you truly love game designing, but you’re not quite sure whether if you want to take this up professionally or not, and you’re looking for a quick trailer for you to understand whether are you enjoying this creative process or not? Well, then this article can definitely help you out because today I’ll be sharing with you five online courses that you can take up at absolutely no cost and the best part is that all of these courses are coming from some of the top universities of the world. So let’s not waste more time, let’s start with course number one on our list.

Course №1

So the first game design course on our list is offered by the University of Arts London. It’s the same place where iconic designers like Stella McCartney, Alexander McQueen have got their education. It’s one of the most prestigious arts and design institutions of the world, and if you plan to take up this course, it will not just teach you about the basics of game designing, but also about the process, development and production that is involved in making a successful game possible. There’s also a little bit of programming that’s involved, but you don’t have to be an ace programmer to apply for this course, even beginners can apply for it. Every day if you spend 10 to 15 minutes learning, it will take you four weeks to complete this program. But if it takes you more than six weeks to complete all this course content, or if you also want a verified certificate along with it, then we need to pay an additional amount of $59, but that’s a completely optional step.

Course №2

The second game design course on our list is offered by the California Institute of the Arts and do you know this place was founded by Walt Disney. Probably one of the reasons why some of the top international visual designers, animators, artist graduates from the same institution.

If you plan to take up this game designing course, it will teach you about the theoretical aspect of design. What is game design? What are the different types of game designing? What makes the game engaging? How do you maintain that interest or attention span of your user?

Now, some games are visually very aesthetic, but we are just not motivated enough to complete the game and some games are visually very simple, very humble, but we are just so hooked on to it. We want to get to the next level and the next level, so what’s the psychology behind that? What’s the role of an enemy in the game? Is the enemy important? Is it not important? What’s the importance of a multiplayer game? All of such details will be taught in this course, then you’ll be able to answer all these questions by the end of this course program.

Course №3

Next on our list is the introduction to video game development, and which is offered by the Polytechnic University of Valencia, and this will teach us about the basics of scripting and unity. In case you’re wondering why these two people never heard of them, well, unity is an open-source gaming software, or that means is you can download the legal version of the software without having to pay any money, that’s the coolest part, and you can develop the most intricate-looking game designs with the software. It has so much potential.

Although it can be a little intimidating at first because you have so many tools to play around with, you know, once you get your basics right, you will have so much fun. Once you have designed your game and let’s say you have a character in the game and you want this character to run when you hit R on the keyboard or you want your character to keep hopping or touch fire and lose a life. If you want all of these characteristics to happen, then you need to tell Unity to perform these functions and for that, we need to write a technical code, and that code is known as scripting. So we will get to learn all of these basics with this course. Every day if you spend half an hour learning, it will take you six weeks to complete this entire program and as I mentioned, you don’t have to pay any money to access this course content.

Course №4

Next on our list is digital platforms and storytelling, and this is offered by the University of Cambridge. Whether you’re a writer preparing a script for a play video or a radio show or podcast. Either way, you are telling a story to your audience, or even if you’re designing your own game, we use a combination of light, sound, space to create this new world altogether so that we can connect with our audience, and this course is just about that, how do you enhance your storytelling skills and how do you engage the audience? How do you maintain that attention span? All of these details will be taught in this course and every day if you spend 1–1½ hr learning, it will take you about four weeks to complete the entire course, and you don’t have to pay any money to access the course content. However, if you want a verified certificate from the University of Cambridge, then we need to pay around $200, but that’s a completely optional step number.

Course №5

Next on our list is called creating video games, and this is offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which again needs no introduction and as the name suggests, this course is all about game designing, game development, and this exact same course was taught back in 2014 as part of the undergraduate program at the institute. Back then, all the video lectures were recorded, and today all of these lectures are available in the public domain so we can access all the course content, material, video lectures without having to pay any money for that. Every week if you watch two lectures, it will take you four months to complete this program and if you follow along with all these lectures, it’s very much likely that you will be able to develop your own simple game and if your project looks cool, you can add that to your portfolio. However, there’s one thing we need to keep in mind is that even if you come up with an excellent project and you complete this course on time, we will not be able to get a verified certificate. This course is simply for knowledge.

Course №6

There is a course on game development which is offered by Harvard University, the same place where Ratan Tata and Barak Obama got their education. It’s one of the most prestigious universities in the world. If you have a computer science background and you have an intermediate knowledge of programming, but you want to do something in the field of game design, then you will love this course, this is just meant for you. If you study every day, if you learn for 1–1½ hr, it will take you three months to complete this course. By the end, you will easily be able to develop your own 2D, 3D game, which is a very cool thing and you can also add that game to your portfolio.

If you want a verified certificate from Harvard University, then you need to pay $199 for that. Well, that’s a completely optional step. If you don’t want that, you can access all the cost content without having to pay any money, and you’ll get to learn so many new things.