Good learning resources are hard to find. Especially if you’re seeking free content. The internet is filled with content creators, all looking to grab your attention.

As an entrepreneur, I’m fond of collecting and sorting resources. I want to focus my time and my mind on courses that are worth the investment. Although we love long lists of links, we often end up skimming through them. We add a few to our favorites and never check them again.

I like to approach things the other way around: I filter lists of websites and books down 1 or 2 sources that feel deep, accessible and efficient. And I stick to them. I prefer a single book like Jesse Schell’s Art of Game Design over a list of 50 random websites. I’d rather explore a single library like Ctrl-paint rather than watch dozens of cheap Gumroad trainings. I want well-written and energizing courses. I want dense content and authors that I can trust. And I’m sure you do too! This article is here to answer this desire.

To prepare this list, I dug through numerous websites. I drew from countless hours spent looking for resources in the past to bring you the best, free online resources I could find and be recommended. The list is not exhaustive, and not meant to be exhaustive. But it will still keep you fed with valuable information for months!

You will find some popular resources in here, some that you may know very well. But you’d be surprised to see how many fellow developers don’t! To please everyone, I did my best to mix well-known websites with some less common ones. They are organized in categories, each featuring a handful of entries. I also took the word “developer” in the broad sense here.

Game Design

1. The GDCVault’s free section (Video) contains many talks from the Game Developer Conference itself. There, you can find some of the best insights on game creation from some of the most experienced or popular developers in the gaming industry. While Gamasutra offers text-based content for those who prefer that, the GDC vault is focused on videos and slides. Note that the GDC vault is being archived on its new Youtube channel. With a few videos released every week, this is a great place to discover fresh talks from the industry leaders.

2. Pixel Prospector is a reference as far as game creation resources are concerned. This website offers a complete, free guide to marketing your game, as well as long lists of finely categorized resources. From the same author, you can find The Big List of Youtubers. Is is a list of content creators who cover video games classified by their spoken language and preferred genres. You can also find multiple lists of video game journalists on PixelProspector’s VideoGameJournaliser.

3. Extra Credits (Video) is a popular YouTube channel filled with short, specific videos about game design. It also features game recommendations and pleasant history lectures (soon on Khan Academy). The content is insightful and tends to follow the gaming industry’s news stories. Because of that, Extra Credits is a great place to get a quick sense of how the game creation world is evolving.

4. Three Hundred Mechanics is a neat pick shared by a developer friend. The author, Sean Howard, went on a quest to design and write 300 game concepts. In each entry, he documents his ideas and sometimes algorithms or his design process. His website explores numerous ideas and genres, and is quite inspiring. The mechanics exposed there feel pretty original overall. I especially dig the procedural category, as it’s usually hard to find content in that domain. A companion website called Three Hundred Prototypes features a few HTML5 test games that correspond to some of those concepts.

5. Donjon is more of a niche entry. It is both a playful and a useful website for RPG creators out there. It contains a variety of specialized text and value generators to release you from your creative block. You… can create dungeons, shops with randomized descriptions and locations, get lists of names, calendarsyou name it. Donjon even offers specific tools for fantasy games, Dungeon and Dragon inspired games, and sci-fi universes. Although it’s probably meant for tabletop game players initially, it is always useful if you’re working on an RPG.

The next entry is for lovers of the platform genre out there.

6. Scroll Back: The Theory and Practice of Cameras in Side-Scrollers is a Gamasutra article that breaks down elements of a controller’s design for a platforming, side-scrolling game. It offers a deep analysis of the implementation of player controls. It talks about specific techniques to achieve a tight feel. It is not a very long paper, but it is one of a kind I wish I would see more often.

Development

As a rookie programmer myself, so I had to ask experienced, trustworthy teammate for help here.

7. Game Programming Patterns is a free book, as in free beer. It covers a variety of common programming patterns, all applied to game creation. Each and every chapter covers one common pattern, and starts with a concrete example. That’s probably the best part of the book: it always illustrates why a pattern is worth knowing. The author also outlines the limits of a variety of patterns, how they evolved over time, etc. the code examples are written in C++, but are always short and simple to read. Cherry on the cake: a column on the right of each page contains complementary comments to fill any gap the original book might have had.

8. The Ludum Dare is not a learning resource in itself. You probably know it already: it’s a website where very popular game jams are organized multiple times a year. It’s a great exercise, a great experience, but not a free resource in itself. So what is it doing in this list? Think about it: the source code and assets of every game submitted for the main events is available. For instance, you can learn how to structure Haxe code for a game by looking at Deepnight’s lovely creations. Each event comes with its lot of fresh game concepts, and you can learn how each of them was implemented by looking at the sources.

9. The Github Education Pack is a special element in this list, as it’s only relevant to students. It features a variety of normally paid services for developers, offered for free to anyone with a school-issued email address and a valid student ID card. It is worth a lot of money and contains some great, popular plans and services like some cloud hosting, private repositories on GitHub, etc. So if you know some students who could benefit from this, be sure to spread the word!

Digital Art

10. Ctrlpaint.com (Video) offers a full digital art curriculum for free. We are talking of more than 200, free, 5 minute long videos packed with information! Its author, Matt Kohr, is a freelance concept artist working in the entertainment/game industry. So he knows what he’s talking about, and he definitely is a talented teacher.

11. Proko (Video) is a YouTube channel dedicated to the study of the human body and drawing techniques. For aspiring concept artists, art students and other game artists, this is a great place to expand your understanding of the human body. Proko’s videos are beautifully edited and sometimes even feature animations to make their point crystal-clear.

12. 2d Game Art Guru is a blog maintained by Chris Hildenbrand, a senior game artist, with 20 years of experience using vector drawing software. “Life is too short to make bad art“, says the subtitle. Chris creates easy to follow game art tutorials designed with programmers and other non-artists in mind. Animation, vector drawing, game asset modularity… The articles cover a wide range of techniques to make your life easier as an artist. Chris’s latest tutorials are based on the open source tool Inkscape, which offers a rich feature set and is free to use.

13. GDquest or GameDesignQuest (Video) is a YouTube channel mainly dedicated to game art and game creation. It is meant to close the gap between the textual focus of 2d Game Art Guru and the concept art focused Ctrlpaint. There, you will find about 30 polished video tutorials, with one more coming out every week. So far, the channel has been focusing on 2d game art, but it does feature some videos and insights about game design. One new tutorial comes out every Thursday, in English and French.

14. Technical Art: Game art Tricks is a compilation of technical game art analyses. With rendering and assets production tricks pulled from Blizzard’s Diablo 3, Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed 3 or even Edmund McMillen’s The Binding of Isaac, the guides approach all sorts of techniques, games and genres. Ever wondered how parallax was handled in Don’t Starve? Or how 2K games faked the renderer of the inside of a room on their windows in Bioshock Infinite? This website has the solution explained and illustrated for you.

15. Android Arts is an archive of articles written by Niklas Jansson, a talented Sweden artist. The very first one you’ll stumble upon arriving on the page alone is worth reading. It’s a list of tricks and principles to get a better hang of art. Aside from that, Niklas shares notes about his artistic journey on his website. Although his writings can feel a bit all over the place, his pages are filled with images that depict his design thought process in great details. It is some form of indirect resource.

Storytelling

16. Seven Camels, or the Temple of the 7 Golden Camels is actually a blog maintained by the storyboard artist Mark Kennedy, a man known for his work on Disney’s Frozen, Raiponce and Tarzan. Since 2006, he shares all his knowledge about visual storytelling on his blog. His posts are filled with images and broken down into small, informative paragraphs. He analyzes scenes from movies, covers fundamental concepts of design and staging… If you want to create good visual compositions or stories for your games, this blog is an exceptional reference.

17. The Writer’s Journey is one of the greatest classics as far as storytelling is concerned. In this textbook, Christopher Vogler expands on Joseph Campbell’s popular The Hero with a Thousand Faces and tries to show that most stories tend to follow a similar broad structure. If you’re just interested in getting a sense of his theory, the author initially wrote a practical guide for Disney employees. You can read it for free on his website: A Practical Guide to Joseph Cambell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

References

Be it pictures or information, we need good references to design games. For the latter, we at least all know Wikipedia. As it turns out though, good reference photos are not only and slow to collect: they are hard to find. So here are a few places to get great ones.

18. The Reddit SWF Porn Network is not what its name might suggest. It is an organized network of sub-reddits dedicated to sharing beautiful pictures on specific topics. It is an outstanding place to discover new places, animal species and other design ideas.

19. Creative Uncut is a website that collects artworks from a wide variety of console and desktop games. The pictures are provided watermark-free. You can find some beautiful illustrations from Odin Sphere, Breath of Fire V or even the upcoming Dark Souls III.

General Knowledge

There is more to game creation than game design, programming and art. Much more. Some math skills are always interesting to have. You may need to learn a new language to communicate with your audience or to reach a new market. General knowledge expands our mental library, which we draw from all the time to produce new ideas. To round out this list, here are 2 links to teach yourself a bit of everything, online, for free. I’m leaving the filtering work to you on this topic.

20. The No Excuse List provides website recommendations to learn music, languages, programming… all sorts of things, for free. It features entries like Coursera or Khan Academy, 2 of my favorite places for free education.

21. The University of Reddit is another place to find free courses on a wide variety of topics. Social sciences, games, computer science, philosophy… the posts are categorized, and the social network’s voting system helps to find popular lectures.

Summary

Now, you should have enough content to keep you busy studying the art of game creation. Did we miss any of your favorite free learning resources? Do not hesitate to share them with us on twitter!

NEW YORK — One morning, just before classes at New York City’s Quest to Learn Middle School broke for lunch, Etai Kurtzman found himself transformed into a lemon tree.

It was a warm day in late April, and his chatty sixth-grade class had been corralled from a narrow hallway into a classroom at the end of a short hall. Etai, tall and lanky, lugged a gray backpack to a desk that had been pushed up against a wall.

Each student had been cast for a role-playing game either as a honeybee sent out from the hive or as a plant. In a flurry of organized chaos, the students simulated the pollination process: student honey bees, wearing pipe-cleaner antennae, approached classmates pretending to be plants and received small, colored building blocks. When a plant ran out of blocks, it meant their flowers had been pollinated. But the bees had to be careful: some of the plants randomly gave them white blocks, which represented pesticides and caused the bees to die.

Their teacher, Kate Selkirk, was using this game as a starting point for an eight-week unit on math concepts — data analysis and graphing, proportions, probability and slope. But what does a beehive or a lemon tree have to do with any of that?

The designers behind Quest to Learn believe that student engagement is so significantly enhanced by narrative role-play, analog games and digital games that every subject — from health to math — begins or ends with a game.

A lesson about power and privilege, for example, might begin with a card game in which some players are deliberately and arbitrarily more disadvantaged than others. This type of simulation creates real empathy, which helps to make abstract concepts more concrete — and boosts engagement as a result.

But while blended learning — a mix of teacher-led and computerized instruction — is proliferating across the country, schools that wholeheartedly embrace games-based learning remain rare.

“There are a very small number of schools that really try to redesign the school around games-based learning,” said Justin Leites, vice-president of Amplify Learning, a company that makes digital education games. One of the biggest challenges, he says, is bringing games into schools that are bogged down by accountability demands—often ones that rely heavily on standardized testing. Attempts to use games as assessments ruin the playful experiences that make them an effective learning tool, he said. And designing good games is no easy task.

“It’s very hard to design a good game of any sort,” he said. “And a really good learning experience, that’s even harder.” The training teachers need to design strong games for the classroom takes time and money—a hard sell at schools strapped for cash and resources.

But this type of classroom, while unusual, makes perfect sense to Etai and his classmates. At the core of gaming is the concept of a challenge, and a player’s journey to meet it. That makes perfect sense inside a school building, Etai told me.

“It’s not competitive,” he said. “It’s more about ‘let’s figure it out.’”

Quest to Learn is housed in the Bayard Rustin Educational Complex, a massive brick fortress that is home to six schools on West 18th Street in Chelsea. The overlapping schedules of each school create a steady echo of activity in the hallways: a couple of teens who showed up late for school explaining themselves to a school safety officer, teachers ushering wayward kids into classrooms, the sharp beeping of the heavy service elevators.

On that day in late April, the new unit in Etai’s “Codeworlds” math class was built around a narrative about a restless honey bee named Buzz, who leaves the monotony of the hive in search of real fun. The obvious metaphor for bored kids stuck inside a stuffy school building all day immediately seemed to resonate with the class.

The “roll out,” as it’s known in Quest lingo, was intended to get the class invested in the plight of Buzz. The actual math concepts would be delivered as the class returned again and again to this character.

In Etai’s old school, P.S. 41 in Greenwich Village, these concepts would likely have been taught through daily lessons and note-taking. There were no games or role-playing. There were workbooks and worksheets.

“I definitely learned a lot, but it was not as fun, not as interesting,” he said.

Mor Armony-Kurtzman, Etai’s mother, said he rarely talked about school while at P.S. 41. “I expected that when he got to middle school, we’d start hearing [even] less about school,” she said. “It’s the exact opposite.”

When I visited his class again, during lunch one day early in May, Etai munched on mini bagels slathered in cream cheese while he taught me to play a dice game.

The game, called Skunk, was a primer for a lesson in probability. Students roll dice to earn points. You can roll the dice as many times as you want through each of five rounds, but if you roll a one on either die, you earn no points. And a roll of double ones erases all your points. When I asked Etai what the purpose was, he said that he was supposed to learn about the relationship between choice and chance. These two concepts later helped him understand how calculating probability could help him make a decision about whether or not to take a risk.

For Etai, it is easy to find places in his life outside school where probability matters. In games he plays for fun, like Monopoly and another board game called Settlers of Catan, players make strategic decisions that can be more expertly executed if they understand the probability of rolling a particular combination of numbers on the dice.

In Settlers of Catan, Etai explained, players choose which parts of an imaginary new world to settle. Different types of terrain come paired with different numbers.

“In that game, you strategize where you place pieces based on the likelihood of numbers you’ll roll,” he said. “I never took into account the number of choices, the possibilities when rolling the dice. I thought the numbers were there just because. Now I know.”

And suddenly, the bee role-playing game that he had participated in weeks earlier also made sense. “I realized that the activity actually had something to do with probability, because there were only three white blocks,” he said.

This sort of indirect entry into a Common Core standard — in which students are supposed to realize the usefulness of a concept before they learn how to use it — is at the root of all teaching instruction at Quest, according to Rebecca Rufo-Tepper, the director of professional development for the Institute of Play, which promotes gaming in schools and designed Quest to Learn. The old mantra that demands kids work before they play doesn’t apply. Here, playing enables the learning. But the two cannot exist in isolation. Traditional learning must still happen to help students master standards.

 

“A game can’t do everything, and that’s a mistake we often see,” said Rufo-Tepper. “The game has a very specific role.”

In Skunk, that role was to get kids thinking about how and when they can use choice to beat chance. Only then were the kids ready — eager, even — to learn how to mathematically calculate the likelihood of rolling any particular combination on the dice.

The games demonstrate to the kids why the skills they’ll soon learn matter beyond tests and grades. Teachers then move on to use more traditional, straightforward teaching practices. Warm-up and group activities and quizzes appear regularly in Etai’s class, sometimes to help settle the kids after a rowdy lunch period.

In the sticky May humidity, Selkirk wrote definitions on the whiteboard with a squeaky black marker while the class fidgeted and copied them down. Video lessons, worksheets and group work followed.

These are, after all, sixth-graders. “There is a routine, a regular structure,” Selkirk said. “You can’t abandon traditional teaching practices. It’s not ‘Play a game and you’re never going to have to demonstrate that you’ve learned anything.’”

After playing Skunk, the kids had two days of more straightforward math lessons. They charted all the potential combinations they could roll on two dice to help them visualize how probable it was to roll any particular combination. They practiced expressing probability in fractions, in their notebooks and on worksheets. That learning was then reinforced with yet another game, called Caterpillar.

In Caterpillar, students used their knowledge of how likely it is to roll a specific dice combination to place blocks, called mushrooms, on a plastic game board. Etai’s favorite parts of this game? Doing the math quickly. Strategizing. And winning as a result.

And then it was time for the quiz.

Etai peered at the screen of a silver MacBook laptop, his notebook open on the desk next to him. He moved quickly through the multiple-choice questions, including one very confusing-looking chart full of fractions; he told me that it was a frequency chart. He scanned it, considered his options and paused. Click. Swipe. Remembering the chart he’d completed with his class a few days earlier, he answered all but one of the questions correctly.

But the class average score on the probability quiz was just 76 percent, a reflection of the sometimes-difficult task of getting kids to use game strategies when no games are present.

And yet, middle schoolers at Quest perform well on state standardized tests. For example, in 2013, the school reports, 56 percent of Quest middle school students scored higher than their citywide peers on the statewide English language arts test. Richard Arum, an education researcher based at New York University, is working with the school to study its efficiency by tracking things like student test scores over time. But administrators stress that test scores are not the primary clue that a school is working. The games teach students how to think and how to design their own learning opportunities—skills not easily measured on a test.

By May 20, Buzz, the honeybee who fled the hive, had tried new food at a picnic (a lesson in proportions and bar graphs) and evaded the Queen Bee’s scheme to lure him back. The class had created line graphs and histograms, and had also learned about how bees see color differently from humans.

 

At the beginning of one lesson, Etai worked on a crossword puzzle filled with algebraic terms like “linear,” “absolute” and “y-axis.” I asked why he thought they were reviewing the terms, and what this had to do with Buzz. “In the beginning of the year, we learned about coordinates, so I think this may eventually get into that,” he said.

For the rest of the period, he sat hunched over a table with his classmates Alex, Sydney and Kevin. Linear equations flashed on a laptop screen. The game, called Get to the Point, required them to solve equations and plot all the possible coordinates on an oversized plastic graph. For example, “If x+y = 6” appears, the players put cubes on all the potential answers. It was a fast-moving game, but Etai seemed less concerned with winning than with getting the problems right.

They used quick mental math, their pens and notebooks banished to the corners of the desk, until one problem stumped them. “The product of x and y is positive or negative 12” flashed across the screen. Etai and Sydney reached for their pencils while the others worked through the math out loud, brows furrowed.

I stood by, the most confused in the bunch, while the boys tentatively placed blocks on the board, looking for validation in one another’s eyes. Kevin and Etai placed their last pieces on the board and peered at each other. “Are we done?” one boy asked.

As it turns out, they weren’t. An answer key on the laptop revealed that they’d forgotten one coordinate — grounds for lost points, according to the rules of the game. The next few minutes were spent arguing over who exactly would lose the point. And then they clicked to the next challenge.

In two years, Etai will start the high school application rat race in New York City. While Quest does extend to high school, whether Etai will stick around that long remains to be seen.

His parents say the games have made him a risk-taker, unaffected by the frustration he often felt in elementary school if something didn’t work the first time. It was not until he got to Quest that he realized just how good he was at math, said Armony-Kurtzman.

But some parents worry that if their children leave Quest for a more conventional classroom, the absence of games could be detrimental to their learning.

Anita Ramsey, whose daughter Mia is in Etai’s class, said her daughter used to be shy and reluctant to participate in class. Now she raises her hand frequently and comes home energized about her schoolwork. Ramsey worries that a return to rote memorization might push her daughter back into her shell, putting her at a disadvantage.

In 2014, according to Rufo-Tepper, 52 percent of Quest eighth-graders returned for ninth grade, while a sizeable 28 percent went to selective or specialized high schools around the city, a sign that the model is working well so far. Although 20 percent of students left after middle school, that is partly attributable to the fact that Quest to Learn has no track record yet for high school (it will graduate its first senior class next year).

 

 

Selkirk said narratives like the one about Buzz the bee teach her students creativity and problem-solving. “Those are skills that will lead them to be successful in any classroom,” she said.

Etai agrees. When I asked him if he thought that growing accustomed to learning with games would make high school harder if he left Quest, the answer was a definitive no. And for high school, he has no doubt he’ll be at least as prepared as anyone else — no matter what kind of school he attends.

At the end of May, the sixth-grade class left the bubble of their school. They’d spent three humid days drudging through lessons about slope — where to find it and how to calculate it. Now Buzz was on the hunt for something fun to do.

A long, noisy subway ride dropped them off at Brooklyn’s Coney Island for a good old-fashioned field trip. Chaperones ran after Etai and crew as they zipped on and off of rides at Luna Park. The students huddled together to answer questions from a handout about how they’d experienced slope in real time on the rides, and about how the games they had played illustrated probability and other terms they’d learned.

After a ride on a bumpy red roller coaster that dipped up and down and spun around sharp corners, Etai crouched near the exit and pulled out a pencil.

“No-slope is more thrilling because you’re going against gravity and it kind of makes you feel weird,” he wrote.

But after waiting in line for another ride, he changed his mind, darting out of his seat and bolting for the exit. That ride — mini-airplanes that spun and flipped their passengers vertically — had no slope, he told me. And no slope was a no-go.

The experience at the park would later help him design his own roller coaster in class — complete with an example of each different type of slope — using Minecraft.

At the park, Etai and his classmates looked like kids from any other middle school: energetic, loud, a little bit hyper. They seemed as concerned with re-riding the Steeplechase roller coaster as many times as possible as they were with finishing their assignment packets. They laughed and ate candy, but they were also talking about math, even while on the rides. When Selkirk rode a roller coaster with a group of students, they shouted out the different kinds of slopes as the ride whipped up and down.

The larger point of the trip — to see where math happens in real life — didn’t seem lost on the bunch. Playing games, whether at an amusement park or in the classroom, is no gimmick, said Ella Reyl, a classmate who was in Etai’s group for the trip. The games and activities and trips, Ella said, are for the future.

“It’s not to just copy stuff down,” she said. “It’s for next time, when we don’t have a game. We have a way to think about it.”

And learning how to think is arguably the point of it all.

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about technology in the classroom.