I have been taking Massively Open Online Courses at Coursera, but this is the first one at Udacity. The two platforms take different approaches… Coursera is more like a virtual classroom while Udacity feels like a very well designed interactive tutorial. Udacity is self-paced with very short video clips interspersed with questions and quick programming assignments. On the other hand, courses at Coursera start at specific dates and the assignments have deadlines. All students of a batch enroll in the class at the same time and discuss same topics on forums as the course progresses. This gives a more real university classroom like structure to Coursera.
The ‘HTML5 Game Development’ course teaches basic skills to get started with 2D game development. It does that by going through techniques and tools that were used to develop GRITS. GRITS can be downloaded from here. The overall quality of the course could be improved, particularly the grader bugs in some of the assignments were frustrating. Still I had a good time, mainly because Udacity as a platform is great and going by the posts in discussion forums, rest of the computer science courses at Udacity have excellent content. I would be hooked on Udacity for some time 🙂
Following are the tools used or recommended during the course:
| Creating Sprite Sheets | http://www.codeandweb.com/texturepacker |
| Map Editor | http://www.mapeditor.org/ (Tiled) |
| Physics Engine | http://box2d.org/ |
| Audio Editor | http://www.goldwave.com/ |
