About GoodLearning
Hello! I’m building GoodLearning.com to teach people creative skills in a fun environment. I hope to expand the world’s capacity for making beautiful things.
GoodLearning.com shows you how to make your own games, from start to finish. As you complete game projects, you learn valuable creative skills useful for much more than building awesome games. What a great way to learn!
Skills and Applications
GoodLearning game projects are divided into several lessons, each focusing on one particular skill area using one software application. This makes it easy for you to focus on specific skills and applications, if that’s what you want.
Skills
- Game Design and Planning
- Game Art Creation — 2D and 3D
- Sound Effects Creation and Editing
- Music Composition
- Game Programming
Applications
GoodLearning teaches you skills using top-quality free applications. Some lessons teach advanced features of paid software versions, but these are carefully kept separate for your convenience.
- GIMP
- Inkscape
- Audacity
- GameMaker
- and more…
Real skills. Real fun.
You could learn these skills in lots of places, but here at GoodLearning, we make learning fun and more effective. Except for the most basic lessons, everything you learn here works towards the goal of building your own video games.
- Keep your goals in sight: Game project-based learning puts skills in perspective with an end result in sight.
- Learn for a reason: Learn and apply creative skills with a purpose, instead of learning just for the sake of learning.
- Creative freedom: Every lesson is designed to give you creative freedom where you want it.
- Focus your skills: If you’re only interested in one skill area, GoodLearning helps you focus by providing source files for all other skill areas in a project. If you’re here only to learn 2D animation, for example, you can download sound, music, and game project files without building them. Spend time on your animations, and let GoodLearning do the rest.
About your teacher
I’ve been building games, making graphics, and tweaking sounds on the computer since 1981.- I studied Mechanical Engineering and Journalism in college, and then moved to Chicago, IL to work in advertising.
- I ended up in various graphic arts production jobs, where I learned the ins-and-outs of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and a bunch of programs that have since fallen from grace.
- I built and worked in a few electronic prepress departments in Effingham, IL, where I taught myself various programming skills to solve production problems.
- I developed and ported numerous music education software programs for Mac and PC in Champaign, IL, until I decided the internet was here to stay.
- I worked as a web programmer and manager for a few organizations in Champaign before going freelance with WordPress-specific development. That’s when I learned how cool it is to create quality screencast videos teaching people how to do things, as I did this for my clients and staff regularly.
- Finally, here I am at GoodLearning.com, combining my love for games, art, and teaching to help you make great games while learning valuable skills.
How GoodLearning is Produced
Game Projects
- I decide on a game. These may be inspired by classic games I always wanted to tweak, or may be original concepts.
- I break the game down into lessons, based on skill area and application, designed to be 10 minutes or less in length.
- For some lessons, I consult with other experts to come up with the best solutions.
- I complete a lesson myself, to make sure I have all the right steps.
- I build a screencast as I complete the lesson a second time.
Technical Details
The GoodLearning.com website runs on WordPress, hosted on VPS.net. The site theme started out as the free “JournalCrunch” theme from Site5 hosting, but I modified more then 50% of it for my specific uses and efficiencies. All videos and most still images are served up via Amazon S3 and CloudFront, to make the site faster for everyone.
Screencasts are made with Camtasia Studio. I use a Shure head-worn microphone with my Blue Icicle XLR to USB converter.