#204 overallHidden gem
CS50's Introduction to Game Development
Harvard University
2 recommenders · 3 threads · recommended in 2 years, 2020–2021 · score 2.2
A Harvard CS50 course that teaches game development using Lua and the LÖVE framework, with later lessons using Unity. Commenters say the core course is free, with optional paid extras.
Commenters call it an excellent, much-recommended course that is practical, hands-on, and accessible to beginners.
Recommendations by year
20062026
This may not be age appropriate depending on your kid, but the (free) CS50 course for games from Harvard [1] is outstanding and accessible to someone with a beginner level of experience. It's not as intro level as something like Scratch would be, but it's very practical hands on learning with tons of resources for anyone who wants to get "serious" about game programming.
[1] https://cs50.harvard.edu/games/2018/
I like BASIC and recently been thinking it might be nice to do some modern game dev on BASIC. My father got me into programming on a TI-99/4A [0] machine, so the BASIC language always has a place in my heart.
However, I recently also came across a nice game development course from Harvard, CS-50 [1] (an excellent course, much recommended!). And for CS-50 the Lua language is used in combination with the LÖVE [2] framework.
After previously dabbling with SpriteKit [3] and Swift I have to admit LÖVE has been extremely pleasurable and fun to use. It's really nice to get some quick results. And you can easily build for multiple platforms (iOS, macOS, Windows, Android, ...)
I also love that I'm able to develop just using SublimeText [4], a very lightweight editor and pretty serviceable for doing Lua dev ... no IDE required, just like BASIC.
It's a nice change of pace from the normal heavy-handed Xamarin (C#) / Xcode (Swift/Objective-C) dev that I do in my day-to-day work, making "boring" business apps.
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[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A
[1]: https://cs50.harvard.edu/games/2018/
[2]: https://love2d.org
[3]: https://developer.apple.com/spritekit/
[4]: https://www.sublimetext.com
Since the game is open source and developed with LÖVE, you can probably just download the source code, go into the root directory of the game and type 'love .' in a terminal. You need to have LÖVE installed of course.
The game might not run (rather crash) if the game uses some Windows specific dependencies.
I am also gonna add a little bit of self promotion here ...
So far I've finished one game in LÖVE, which is Paratrooper (available on macOS AppStore [0]). I have almost finished my second LÖVE game called Lethal Pongbat [1] which I will release for macOS and Windows on Steam.
I have already plans for a 3rd game that I hope to start on in the coming months and which will be a BOOM clone [2].
I learned LÖVE through the Harvard Game Programming course [3], which I can recommend anyone as a starting point into game dev. In later lessons the course also uses Unity. The course can be followed for free, but you can pay some money for some extra features.
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[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFX0FlO_g9Q
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNhn77ipGTc
[2]: https://macintoshgarden.org/games/boom
[3]: https://online-learning.harvard.edu/course/cs50s-introductio...