So one of my classes this semester is for Serious Games, with my lecturer being Dr. Mark McMahon. He's the program director for Game Development at ECU, and he has a history with games for training and education. I actually saw him speak at GO3 back in 2008, and even noted his talk on my blog.
The Serous Games class is turning out to be far more interesting than I'd expected, and it's leaving me with a lot to think about as far as my future goes in game development. Making educational games or training games is not something I honestly considered as a career path. But the more I am thinking about serious games... well, seriously; the more I am considering the potential of making games that teach.
During tonight's class, I was struck by something. The fact that Agile - the game project I'd started several months ago but simply couldn't finish due to a lack of skills with Actionscript - could very easily be made into an educational game. The whole inspiration for Agile was spurred on by the fact that game development has a very rockstar appeal; I've not yet come across something that appealed to people wanting to get into game development that, hey, this is way more complex than you realize. Seeing more than half the class drop out in the first year at TAFE was the motivation to start playing with the idea.
So when I wrote the game design document for Agile it was meant to be informative and fun, but not necessarily truly educational on game development methodologies. The more I think about it, the more I think that could be rectified - Agile could be an educational game very easily. And what more, I think I could make it fun, and teach a lesson all at once. The more I think about it, the more complex I see the game become in my head. Somehow, I don't see it just turning out as jumping around on platforms anymore.
I'll spend time making notes and writing a new document. This time I think I'll skip the "learning to program" and get an actually working game out of Torque or the like. I can remake it in Flash once I know more about actionscript rather than setting my goals too high.
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