Overview
The Game Creators’ Odyssey is the gateway to an epic quest where learners acquire valuable knowledge on game creation. The program is split into 2 acts. The first one, Rational Game Design, explores the ways games are made, from player skills to game mechanics and atomic parameters and their signs and feedback. The primary objective is to make students understand how innovative mechanics are created by analyzing and rationalizing different game structures.
The second act, called Rational Level Design, dives into creating immersive game worlds that provide players with enjoyable game experiences. The main objective is to help students understand the development of games that ensure variety, players’ constant motivation and great flow. These will be achieved through multiple design practices and prototyping activities.
The Game Creator’s Odyssey program is a joint effort of Ubisoft, KnowledgeOne and Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Challenges
Offered as an in-person experience at Ubisoft, the transfer of the program to an online medium faced multiple challenges, from the creation of a community of practice while considering the inherent solitary approach of elearning, maintaining the learners’ engagement in the program, to graphic design and gamification elements that needed to ensure a constant correlation to Ubisoft’s gaming universe. For this, different teaching approaches and personalization of the learning path had to be considered.
Further, the training portal had to provide ways of administering students, adapt quickly to different curricula, track progress and offer reports on students’ results. The content had to be delivered in both English and French.
Approach
Multi pedagogical strategies have been implemented to overcome the different challenges posed by the training program’s transition to online learning. With a clear definition of success in mind and careful planning, the developed courses combined gamified elements and iterative processes to secure a high level of interactivity between learners, learners and content, learners and instructor. The main goal was to ensure student engagement, build an organic feedback process, encourage deep thought and reflection, positively change behaviour, and authenticate learning.
The main focus of the educational approaches revolved around:
- Direct instructions through narrated, animated videos, transcripts and interviews,
- Independent work paired with knowledge checks and embedded feedback,
- Problem-based learning through the analysis of concrete examples of games created by Ubisoft and other game developers,
- Experiential, hands-on learning through students’ development of their game concepts.
All the different approaches were meant to encourage students to develop problem-solving skills and learn concepts. Further, the content span over the following aspects:
- Professional level content: the course’s content is both timeless and timely, as it is being used in multiple active game studios to train their employees in game design.
- Industry-wide scope: the practices studied and analyzed in the course come from various video games of all scales and genres, from triple-A to independent titles.
- Widespread design concepts: while the course is focused on game design, it also draws on many design concepts that are known beyond the video games industry, such as architecture, car design, psychology, etc.
At the same time, learners access insider insights through industry tips and exclusive interviews with Ubisoft’s game developers.
A variety of multimedia resources have been deployed, ensuring a learning environment that helps students make connections across curricula rather than focusing on individual elements.
As such, learners dive into a problem-solving approach combining theory with actual game design practice. To develop students’ understanding, learning experiences were selected to be interconnected and appear in different forms with different challenges that build on previous learning.
The finalized training portal encompasses different access levels:
- For instructors and administrators, access to an administrative dashboard allows easy management of registered students. On top of this, KnowledgeOne’s proprietary Learning Management System provides instructors with different reports regarding the enrolled learners and their performance in the course.
- For learners, which includes a multitude of features and design elements:
- Navigation help
- Narrated, animated lectures
- Knowledge checks
- Gamified elements providing badges and a leaderboard
- Access to minigames and exclusive content from Ubisoft’s experts
- Glossaries and different templates
- Gated progression accompanied by a fantasy story, immersing students in the Ubisoft universe (ACT 1 building upon the For Honor franchise and ACT 2 on the Watch Dogs franchise)
- Certificates of completion that bear Ubisoft, KnowledgeOne, Concordia University and our partner institutions logos
Results
Over 2 000 learners registered in the training program through our partner institutions.
20 partner institutions with the list growing constantly.
“Integrating GCO into our Video Games major for our Digital Arts students was a great experience. The students were able to deepen in a practical and playful way all the knowledge they had acquired thanks to the very fun platform.”
“The Game Creators’ Odyssey is an excellent experience making the teaching of Game and Level Design attractive. Clean and well-designed, it has allowed our students to improve their skills in these areas.”
“Game Creators’ Odyssey is a very interesting and useful complement to game-making learning. A true “level up” to your game development knowledge!”
A memorable program
The Game Creators’ Odyssey program is a unique online course with striking visuals and exclusive content building on Ubisoft’s know-how and KnowledgeOne’s expertise in creating memorable learning experiences.