Looking back, we can say that 2019 was the year of birth of devtodev educational platform. We produced courses before, on game analytics, for example, or on basics of game design (ru), but we didn’t separate them from our analytical service. They were simply the result of devtodev analysts’ public educational activity.
In the past year, devtodev educational centre found its own feet and turned into an important recourse for everyone working or dreaming of working in the gamedev industry. Nowadays we regularly create online courses and host webinars (not only about analytics and not only in Russian language), write articles, guides, e-books. And, of course, we dream of conquering the world!
New courses and creation of the Board of Experts
In 2019 we launched seven online courses aтd we are no more limited to game design and game analytics. We turned our attention to such fields as game development, testing, psychology and free-to-play game operating.
In order to control the quality of our content, we decided to create an expert community around our educational platform. This community will be responsible for evaluation of all materials of our online courses. To this selection panel or “Board of Experts”, as we call it, we invited recognized specialists with versatile and vast gamedev experience.
Currently, the following people are listed as members of devtodev Board of Experts:
-
Alexander Shtachenko, Product Owner at GamePoint
-
Artyom Volkov, indie, freelancer, gdcuffs
-
Vladimir Agarev Creative Producer at Gaming Point
-
Evgeny Ovchinnikov, Producer at Agcat games
-
Eugen Sudak, Head of Game Design at Pixonic
-
Elena Bugakova, Producer at AppQuantum
-
Ilya Popenker, Product Manager
-
Konstantin Savochkin, indie, freelancer
-
Max Fomichev, Producer at Pixonic
-
Nick Filatov, Lead Game Designer at 1C Game Studios
-
Roman Ilyin, CEO SunGear Games
-
Yulia Komarova, Senior Game Designer at Zillion Whales
All of them already cooperated with our platform one way or another: they were speakers in our courses, helped with editing final content and wrote detailed reviews on everything we did. As platform grows and moves in the direction of new topics, we will accept new people to our community.
Results by numbers
Past year was very fruitful. Besides creating new courses, we also organized webinars, wrote articles, grew network of partner authors, developed subscriber community on Facebook.
What we did in 2019:
-
Produced 7 online courses in Russian (Mathematics in Game Design, Introduction to Game Development, Gamedev QA, Creating Games on Unreal Engine, Psychology in Game Development, Live Ops in Games, HTML5 Game Development),
-
published 25 articles (most of them are in both Russian and English) including guest posts,
-
hosted 30 webinars (some of them are open to the general public and some were held for different companies as part of their corporate education),
-
held some educational workshops for WhaleApp, Alternativa Platform and Digitoy,
-
acquired 8.5K course participants.
One record we would like to mention separately. We got more than 1000 registrations on our webinar about monetization mechanics with King’s ex-creative director Fawzi Mesmar!
How we worked with feedback
The whole year we read kind messages from people who entered the profession, moved one step closer to their own game, or simply had a good time while learning something new. We didn’t expect that our course on creating games on Unreal engine may be a reason for some families to gather together, but we got letters from mothers and fathers saying that they helped their kids with making a game.
We've also worked with negative reviews which we always take seriously: we've fixed mistakes, rethought the course production (hence the idea of Board of Experts), dealt with every case individually by offering additional activities for people who got from a course less than they expected.
Feedback is very important for devtodev. We are always happy to see your reviews because they help us to get better!
About the future
Platform development leads to more sophisticated functionality. That’s why we are currently working on major conceptual and technological changes. Education on our platform will get more convenient.
We will also add a form to our website where you can apply for hosting your course on our platform or for collaboration on the development of a new online course.
Courses on mobile game marketing, narrative design, level-design, hyper-casual games, monetization and many more are coming soon.
New topics and new frontiers are ahead! We feel that our work is very important for the industry development. We find proof of it, for example, in analyst and game designer job descriptions, where recruiters list devtodev courses as a requirement or an advantage for potential candidates. Success stories of our graduates who found a job or changed career after they took a course on our platform also motivate us a lot.
Happy New Year!
devtodev team
