I ran my first intro to game dev workshop yesterday for my local gamedev meetup. It was a little rough, but I have some good plans for future workshops.

This workshop was meant to be a test run for a longer version of it I plan on giving at my local library either in december or in the new year. Since it was just a test run, I didn’t advertise it much besides making a meetup event for it and sharing that with my friends.

I had a turnout of 4 people, 2 of whom are regulars at the game dev meetups and 2 were friends of mine. All in all not a bad turnout considering it was all word of mouth.

Growing Pains

I tried to distribute the workshop content on this site, but accidentally resized the cart images when I did, so nobody was able to load the carts from the website.

I had to send the files to each person individually, which was a bit of a pain and threw me off right at the start. I’ve since fixed it, so now anyone can load up the pico8 carts from here.

The Venue

Since this was a test run for a free workshop, I tried running the whole thing at a coffee shop / bar near me. I figured the place would be pretty dead on a monday night, but I was very wrong.

There were probably 20 people in there drinking and being merry. Which was nice to see, but felt very distracting as someone trying to teach a technical subject. Luckily for me, the group was small and everyone was able to hear me just fine.

The Subject

Programming

I was lucky that everyone who attended has done some programming in the past. I didn’t realize how much material I needed to cover to build breakout, the hour and a half was barely enough to cover up to collision detection. Teaching the basics of programming along with that would’ve been too much.

Collisions

I think when I run the longer form version at the library, I may put a bit more focus on making some pretty visual effects with pico8 and do some simple platforming rather than breakout. Pico8 does not come with any collision detection systems out of the box, and implementing or even explaining AABB was a little difficult, even with my mildly technical audience.

I knew AABB would be a crunchier part of the workshop, but even with my technically inclined group, it was hard for me to impart an intuitive understanding of how AABB works.

Changes I should probably make before the larger workshop

• Maybe change the project from breakout to a simple platformer. it’d make physics a little more complicated, but make collision detection easier, probably

• Provide the collision and maybe physics code on this site, so people can copy and paste it into their games during the workshops

Feedback

I reached out to the atendees and they all seemed to have had a good time, despite me feeling like the event was a little rough. That’s really encouraging.

The main points of feedback I got were

• I was going a little too fast when explaining the different parts of making the game
• AABB felt like too large a spike in complexity, given the rest of the workshop was very easy and not at all math heavy
• There is a lot of material to cover, so I should break it up a bit more, so it’s not as dense.

Finally

All in all, it was a solid test run for this workshop. I’m really looking forward to refining it for the larger one at the library. I have to figure out a way to advertise for it too.