Hey all,
While it's not technically crowd-funding, you may have already seen that I've started a site called indie game school. The goal of the site is to contact great teachers and to get them to teach classes on various aspects of gamedev, and my intention is for most of them to be evolving Playmaker. I'm not involved with Hutong Games in any way and am purely doing this to create the sort of training that I'd like to get
Tutorials are great (I've literally watched thousands over the years), but they're a lonely way to learn. Personally, I much prefer actual classes that are based
around tutorials but that are facilitated by a teacher and are taken by group of people at the same time, with the goal of creating something. You get feedback not only form the teacher, but also from your classmates and get to apply the knowledge you've learnt directly. It's a much more effective way of learning IMO.
Our first class starts in just under two weeks and is taught by Christopher Orth, the man behind the excellent PM tuts. It's called an FPS Design class but you can make any 3D game that is played in FP-perspective. It's the first in a series, with later classes dealing with things like menu creation, Photon integration, Mecanim and more.
The 'downside' of this is that paying a teacher to create the tuts and then give individual feedback on your progress costs money. At the moment, this means A$50 (~US$45) to get access to the tuts, the feedback and the ability to ask questions in forums as well as live sessions. We're looking into ways to make this more modular, so that the people who only want the tutorials can get them along with peer-support forums and those who want the extra support form the instructor can pay for it when/if they need it.
What do you all think of this approach?