Hi everyone,
Like many of you, I have spent a lot of time with game development tools from The Game Creators over the years. FPS Creator was (and still is) a great tool for making first person shooter games. While it may not be a “triple-A” development tool nothing beats FPSC on ease of use.
Building computer games with FPSC can teach you a lot about game design, including level design, story development, creating 2D/3D graphics, sounds and scripting. This gave me the idea of using a specialized version of the open source FPSC for educational use. I will get back to that…
First, a little back-story. I have an education in computer games development and I have worked both as a level designer and in quality assurance on several commercially released mobile games back in 2007-08. After this, I turned my attention to education where I have seven years of experience teaching communication, IT and game development. One year ago, I got a position as head of a new game development education in Denmark. As part of a Danish technical gymnasium, our students typically are 16-19 years of age and we teach them everything they need to know about basic game design. This includes a lot of time with the Unity game engine and student projects based on building new computer games. I probably have the best job in the world.
Sadly, I see a paradox in IT education. More and more kids use computers as a natural part of their everyday lives (some call the young generation ‘digital natives’) but at the same time, our new students have less and less experience with advanced work on a computer. Sure, everyone can post to Facebook and Snapchat a hundred times a day but the easy-of-use we see in modern day touch devices has a hidden downside - fewer people actually get to play around with high-end tools like Photoshop, 3D Max or know anything about what makes a computer work (upgrading a graphics card in your pc hardly counts here). Being able to install and play computer games, do simple Google searches and post to social media does not give you an education or a job - but somehow I hear comments from people who are blown away by the digital abilities of kids who grew up with smartphones in their hands. This has to stop. You can teach these basic skills to anyone in 15 minutes, so it roughly equals being able to breathe air.
I want kids to get back to computers (as in PC’s, not tablets or smartphones) and start using them for something that actually requires brain cells
Game development is fun, creative work and a great way to learn anything from design, teamwork, programming, sound, image and storytelling. Yes, it is also frustrating at times but in the end, nothing feels more rewarding than seeing your game played by other people. Making computer games is completely different from playing computer games and this message needs to get through to more people (I am preaching to the choir here, I know).
I would love to see game development get more attention in our school systems. These systems are different country to country but I am certain that kids today want to try making games as part of what they learn. FPSC could be the perfect tool for this to happen. It runs on any modern Windows pc and has an intuitive drag-and-drop approach to level design. You literally paint your levels.
With the release of the open source, we can modify FPSC and give it to schools at no cost. FPSC is only the beginning since you can bundle other useful free resources along with it (Audacity, BFXR, LMMS to name a few). It needs to be incredibly easy for users to setup and get started since schoolteachers need to be convinced that trying game development is not scary but a way to achieve a high level of motivation in the classroom.
The target audience for an educational edition of FPSC could be kids from 12-15 years of age. They generally need to be old enough to handle a computer with a keyboard/mouse and not too old since more advanced game tools become more relevant at higher ages. FPSC should be an inspiration to learning more about game design and a stepping-stone to Unity and Unreal engine, not a direct competitor.
We still see issues with the current FPSC open source code we have available. There is no way of telling when functional builds are up and running. The edits I see for an educational FPSC is primarily to strip away features that are not needed (like multiplayer) and realistic blood. If the model packs are released then these should also be added if they make sense in a school context.
So what do you think - is this just a crazy-long text or is it on to something? Do you see a completely different direction for open source FPSC in the future?
