SeanPiotrowski.net

As you can see above I have selected a book for my Game Design course that I am teaching at Rider this Fall. The book as you can see is titled “Half-Life 2 Mods for Dummies” and interestingly enough it is the only book of its type. I chose this book because I liked how it breaks down the level creation process while at the same time using various parts of development to teach you the use of each of the tools within Hammer (Source’s map editing software). I am about 10 chapters into this book and I was surprised how simple it is to create a map and then play your map. I think this simplicity will translate to success in the classroom for this Intro course. This simplicity has also validated my choice, in my mind, to teach Source SDK as opposed to Gamemaker 7, which was previously taught by others.
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So after not having anything to write about for a really long time, I think I’ve finally stumbled across something worth documenting. This Fall I will be teaching “Intro to Game Design” for Rider University’s Computer Information System Department. The course was previously taught using a product called “GameMaker 7″. In my preparation for this class I have decided to move the class to Source SDK. I made this decision because many of the PC market’s top games have been developed recently in Source and I feel it will give my students some real hands on experience with tools actively being used for game development in the industry.

I have decided to chronicle my adventure with teaching Source SDK so that others can learn what a great platform it is for teaching Game Design. Hopefully some discussion will go on and questions will be asked. We will see how that goes. I plan on writing another post in the next day or so chronicling the work I have done already up until this point. From that point forward I will blog as I go.

So until then…