Teaching Game Design
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Teaching isn’t as easy as one might think…
The first year was a learning experience. We were 3 Game Design teachers and my role was to teach about Live Operations in mobile games and how to design in a fast development cycle, for mobile, with F2P in mind.
Structuring a course of more than 20 hours in a few weeks was a task I didn’t expect to have difficulties with… However, putting down all your knowledge, with relevant examples, diagrams, up-to-date data, sources and resources, while keeping all of this light, easy to digest and fun was an enlighting experience.
The second year we revisited how the Academy works, and how we are scheduling courses so we improve synergies between classes. At that time, the other 2 Game Design Teachers had to leave and I stayed the only teacher in that specialty. This meant I had to rework the entire course and fit the content of the 3 classes into 1! While rebuilding the course, took this opportunity to rethink everything. The current course was too advanced, too specific, aimed at almost ready professionals, and we needed to teach more fundamental concepts to very young adults.
I decided to change my approach entirely, since I have way more content to fit into more or less the same amount of time, and that most students coming to my course only had a quick introduction to most concepts.
Instead of teaching with specific examples students have to reflect on in order to learn some advanced concepts, I decided to teach more abstract and generic concepts at the core of Game Design.
Despite the triviality of that decision, and given the context, it wasn’t that trivia: I had to find materials that can support a universal approach to game design, shape a 22h course around all those concepts, and make it so that it can be understood so well that it’ll be applied by students for all sorts of projects.
One of my favorite part of being at the Arc Academy is when we guide the students through their first 3 months long deveopment cycle with a team of 15+. It’s an enlighting experience to see all that was taught being put into a product. Every year I am surprised by how much more they achieve, and 2024 was no exception with the delivery of Candy Chaos and Yunache, 2 games with a big potential which I hope will be realized commercially one day.
Being part of the jury gives me the unique opportunity to practice giving constructive feedback, actionables that our students will add to their backlog and address before the Gold Candidate. It helps practice what I already do at the studio but in a more short-term manner, and with non-professionals. Thus, I have to properly prioritze my feedback as follows:
Candy Chaos a colorful FPS in which the player incarnates a young teenager visiting her grandma during the holidays. She discovers with horror that candies have taken over her farm and the lands around, and takes on her to eradicate the menage before her beloved vegetables disappear.
Explore the rich and charming Bulgarian folklore in this puzzle adventure game. Guide the young “Yunache” through magical lands and help the book of legends to recover its memory by solving puzzles related to ancient Bulgarian folklore and mythology.
In 2018 I met the future founder of the Arc Academy at a Sofia Game Jam event. Little did I know that it’ll start the only Video Games Creation school in Bulgaria, attracting students from neighboring countries too.
Antony Christov is an ex Art Director at Pixar coming back to Bulgaria, his home country, to share his experience and nurture the next generation of artists.
At the same time the Bulgarian gaming industry is struggling to hire talented young, but trained, game developers. I know it very well since I became in charge of the recruitment of Game Designers at Gameloft!
We talk about our common needs and after presenting him to our Studio Manager, Art Director, and HR who in turn present him to other studios, the creation of the Arc Academy is on track.