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.
EM
It's a pretty great course, it shows the basics of worldbuing and from there we can start exploring the deepness of this topic.
MS
Great course! I love how they bring techniques and concepts from other disciplines like gardening, teacher, and ballet that are super useful for world and level design.
RD
I really enjoyed this course, it was a great chance to conceptualize and visualize an entire environment and a visual world!
PF
I found this course really fun and I enjoyed learning about worldbuilding. There is a lot more to it than I originally thought!
AA
Great course! A lot of new and useful stuff. I really enjoyed another part of Game Design: Art and Concepts Specialization. Keep up the great work, guys!
TT
The videos are nice and clear, and I love seeing examples for the homework, it really helped. I also loved reviewing my peers and having them review me, they had awesome ideas!
IE
It's a good course and the instructor encourages us to work creatively. I think could feel too easy for people that have previous experience in storytelling, but even so, I learned valuable things.
EC
Really enjoyed this class. I am a very visual person and this class was much more fun and a bit easier as I could express my ideas visually much more easily than If I had to write everything down.
MM
I got very important knowledge here, the presentation was quite pleasant from other mentors, for me. short, concise and clear.
AA
Excellent course! I studied animation but I didn't know much of the world aspect for game design. This course it's also helpful for animation field.
SA
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.
MM
More ground to cover and harder assignments but all the more learning bc of that :) Example of how to do the assignment v helpful!
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
I feel like the lectures were short summaries - not actual college level lectures. I really don't feel I learned anything.
Incredibly vague and hand wavy. I didn't feel like I had to write anything down.
Boring and common sense.
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.
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.
The lectures did not always fully relate to the assignments. It often felt like the instructor was rambling rather than teaching.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.