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Learner Reviews & Feedback for World Design for Video Games by California Institute of the Arts

4.5
stars
785 ratings

About the Course

Start creating your world. A game world is not just a backdrop for your game—be it minimal or detailed, contained or part of a much bigger universe, it provides the context for your player. Ultimately, a game world should feel alive and wholly unique to any player who will experience it. In this course, we will explore game worlds in existing games and study the art and influences that inform their themes and styles. We will also investigate key components of environment and level design as well as strategies designers use to define gameplay or advance it. We’ll also look at navigation and the elements that make your world as real (or unreal) as you want it to be. A weekly challenge will prompt you to explore styles and inspirations for possible game worlds, and you’ll learn effective ways to communicate your ideas from concepts to presentation-worthy proofs of concept....

Top reviews

SA

Sep 20, 2019

i really loved this course. it inspired me to be more innovative and think out of the box. it changed my mindset a lot. so thanks to my instructor and my peers. your words meant a lot to me.

JK

Sep 10, 2020

This is a fantastic course to run your imagination to it's top! You can built your own game world and show it to other students. The learning curve is definitely improving with this course!

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1 - 25 of 195 Reviews for World Design for Video Games

By Amshumaan R

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May 30, 2016

Unlike the other two lecturers in this course, this module's lecture is very very bad. I always felt like coming back and learning more with the other two lectures but with this one I had to force myself to complete the lessons. First of all his English is bad, sometimes you cant understand what he means even with subtitles. He repeats many things through out the course and he tries to teach by asking questions all the time. As a guy who takes and make his own notes, I found it really difficult to put together a sentence he was saying. It seems that nobody proof read his lectures before posting it on coursera. I feel that it was done blindly and in a rushed way. If possible can you please change the videos and also the script. Please make it more understandable.

By odincarlothegreat

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Oct 12, 2016

A very poor course. The teacher just ask questions in order to stimulate students, but doesn't teach anything. Incorrect terminology (Ah-ah? Please, study Aaron Allston works before inventing other words).

Test are cool.

By Gianmarco D

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Nov 1, 2017

The assignments are ok and the material too, the fact is the course is basically dead, as I have no possibility to let others review my work (reviewed 6 people during week 2 and got nobody reviewing my work, misteriously, even though I submitted three days before the due time). This is a serious problem as paying learners (as I am) risk having to switch session and to pay more, with their learning plans destroyed. Also, there is no moderator, no instructor, no staff member, I'm the only one surfing the forums, and the course content is a pack of advices without a structured form and solidity. Hope Coursera and CalArts staff do something to rekindle this course as it could be really awesome.

By Reinier d B

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Apr 3, 2016

I learned next to nothing from this course; the professor just rambles on and on jumping schizophrenically from aspect of aspect. One moment he's talking about physics, and in the same sentence he's suddenly talking about whether the game should have a crafting system. Some of the information even seems out of touch.

He doesn't state any information with certainty because he always tends to add "or not!" or "...maybe!" after sentences, leaving you to wonder if there's anything left to take away from the lessons. The entire course could be condensed down into a "list of questions to think about while designing your game world" - it really doesn't contain anything more than that.

Sometimes entire segments are dedicated to trivial things (such as "your game could have invisible walls!"), whereas in other segments he works through a hundred different questions without going in-depth to any of them.

Speaker is hard to understand due to his lack of proficiency with the English language and the subtitles are often incorrect.

On the plus side, you will learn what a "ha-ha" is.

By Milos J

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Apr 24, 2016

Very poor content. Everything is already said in last courses in this specialization. Also they didnt gave any techniques or tips how to easier create game worlds

By Yusra D

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Sep 5, 2019

Sorry for the low review :{ .. i just expected a more organised step by step level design rich content.. i think the instructor clearly has much to give, but the course content isn't organised enough, the speech in the videos is just talking around, some things are repeated again in different parts in a way that causes confusion i think .. i hope this is a helpful review :S and thanks for the course

By Michele R

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Apr 15, 2016

I feel like the lectures were short summaries - not actual college level lectures. I really don't feel I learned anything.

By Daniel

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Feb 24, 2016

Incredibly vague and hand wavy. I didn't feel like I had to write anything down.

By steve h

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Jul 21, 2020

Boring and common sense.

By Ruaan G

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Sep 18, 2018

Too basic. Feels like it could've been one lesson but it was cut and stretched over 4 weeks because in this specialization we pay for time, not content. I could learn as much from a Ted talk or similar.

By Ricardo R

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Aug 21, 2018

Not a very interesting course. The material all revolved around finding art online and never really getting a solid foundation for creating a real world for video games.

By Cary K

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Mar 20, 2019

The lectures did not always fully relate to the assignments. It often felt like the instructor was rambling rather than teaching.

By Melissa A

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Dec 2, 2015

It's often not clear the point the professor of this course is trying to make. Instead he often seems to ramble pointing out a 100 little questions that a world designer might ask himself/herself during the process without ever focusing on any. The reader is left not knowing what the key take aways were

By adrian s

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Oct 13, 2021

This has to be one of the worst courses I have seen - I mean the guy has been using so much "Just think about it" that it made it look more like a philosophy class.

So bad, I would write a book about it ... choosing to actually drop the whole specialisation. Don't have this much time to waste.

By Ekaterina S

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Apr 5, 2018

Very bad lectures: very hard to understand the lecturer (very bad english), no material/knowledge shared only a lot of unanswered hypothetical questions brought up.

By Omar J C R

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Feb 29, 2016

I am so glad I found this five course specialization! The teachers are on point. The curriculum compliments the other courses. Thanks to this course, with a little help from the other courses in the specialization, I pushed myself to flesh out a lot of the narrative and design components of my game. Within a month, I have a full fledged story arch, set in a well thought out world that compliments and interacts with the game's narrative, well designed characters, and a balanced and, hopefully, engaging gameplay. Best of all, I've been able to get feedback from other students who have helped point out things I'd missed and suggested ideas. I highly recommend this course, its complimentary courses, and the specialization as a whole!

By Nadya S

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Dec 18, 2016

Before enrolling this course, I expected to obtain some technical skills for creating game environments by different software products, etc. I was surprised: this course teaches the future professionals to THINK ! One can't produce anything without know what he would make. This course will give you clear direction of your ideas about YOUR GAME environement. Like in the drawing: you should know what you would draw. Having the "color palette" is nothing without structuring in your mind your ideas, planning what you would do. Similarly is in my profession - architecture - there are some already graduated students who can only to draft what somebody else tells them to draft. This course will teach you how to create.

By Brit T

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Nov 17, 2016

This is an excellent way to learn the steps of approaching BG design. I entered this course not having the slightest clue of how to start research, and now I feel I have a much better grasp on it thanks to this course. I think my favorite assignment was looking up all the reference photos (project 2?) and explaining what they meant to our game and how they fit in not just with the game mission but related to our characters too. I would like to take another class, focusing on drawing/creating the backgrounds now.

By Ankush S

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May 2, 2020

While designing a world for a game, a lot fo us know where to start from because we want to start from scratch, right? Well, no more!

Completing this course changed my opinion about a lot of things and now I can say that getting inspiration is no where close to cheating as long as you know, how to slide in your creativity in a "common idea".

The transition from one step to another is so smooth, I was able to finish the course and am getting closer towards completing the specialization.

Kudos to the team!

By Darshan M

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Jul 17, 2023

This is overall a good course who wants to learn basic fundamentals about how the world of video game is made. This focuses on how exploring other areas in the video game reveals the story to the audience. I personally liked weeks 3 and 4 where I learned the most about lighting, NPC character, color, etc, which opened up my perspective toward a video game world design. The course also emphasizes visual research, level design, and gameplay.

By Denisse M L M

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Oct 25, 2017

Great course with good material. The word load is small, and can be completed quicker than I thought. I wish it was a bit more dense, but I enjoyed the content nonetheless. Unlike the other courses in the specialization, the speaker in this one is not a native English speaker and he mispronounces words a lot. Without the subtitles, some parts are very hard to understand.

By Jessica H

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Jun 23, 2017

Great course to think of the world you want to create and its limitations.

The plus? You don't have to know how to code or to draw well! (I did all my assignments on Paint and my characters were basically stick figures)

The most important is to think of your world, its structure, its boundaries, and the way your characters interact within it.

By Amanda W

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Mar 22, 2016

Enjoyable course with engaging presentation. I really enjoyed the assignments which encouraged me to actually try out the concepts, without getting too hung up on it being perfect. I also appreciated the assignment examples that were provided - it helped give me a guide as to how detailed or not I should be each week, and gave me

By Dee G

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Feb 7, 2016

Really great course which got me thinking about the game environment a whole lot more than I have ever considered the large impact it has on the successful ability to engage the player and successfully submerge them in the game world. I highly recommend this course to anyone wanting to obtain an insight into games.

By João P G C S

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Jul 8, 2022

Gostei mto do curso. Comecei o curso pensando que já sabia tudo e no fim abrendi bastante coisa. Tive várias ideias. O curso é super válido não só para pessoas que queiram trabalhar com videogame, mas para todo o tipo de roteirista ou designer de produtos audio visuais.