I started recently with CG Cookie to learn more about Blender and so I could eventually create a simple 3D game I had in mind. I must say the courses and resources on Blender itself here are amazing.
I'm not sure how useful the game development flows/courses will be for me as a Linux user/developer though. (I suppose I can give the courses a try to see if I can squeeze some valuable knowledge out and apply it elsewhere)... but I will never use Unity in a professional capacity. Unity doesn't have a Linux build of their editor. The engine itself is also becoming notorious within the Linux gaming community for some nasty bugs affecting already released games. I have more than a handful of Unity games in my personal library that will not work fullscreen - the screen appears black and the game doesn't take any input from a keyboard/mouse. To get these games working, I have to edit a config file, every time, before playing to force the game to launch in a windowed mode. I've seen this same issue pop up from so many users in the last several months on the gamingonlinux forums/IRC channel. When someone logs onto the gamingonlinux IRC and complains that a game won't work at all - someone else will chime in and ask if its a Unity game (and it usually is). So I'm not going to use Unity for my game projects, as Linux support must be a number 1 priority for me.
Sorry for the rant. I love Blender but hate Unity. I was wondering if there any plans to have generalized game development courses that could be applied to any game engine.... or if the plans were to tie all of the game development stuff to Unity.
Unity does have Linux support, it's just in beta versions at the moment, here is the 2017 version: http://beta.unity3d.com/download/b6e0e521da90/public_download.html and here is the forum thread discussing all the Linux versions: https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/unity-on-linux-release-notes-and-known-issues.350256/
I'm not sure how well Unity games work on Linux, I know Unity does support Linux builds although I've never played any of them myself.
Creating general purpose game development courses isn't really going to help anyone. At that point it's mostly theory. It would be similar to teaching general 3d modeling without being specific to any program. It's tough to go deep with that kind of content. If you have something specific in mind let us know. People have mentioned the Blender Game Engine which isn't very well supported so we don't teach it. Unreal Engine is also another, but I'm not sure how well that works with Linux either.
Personally I think building on Linux is more trouble than it should be. A lot of software you may use in game development is probably not Linux compatible and you may run into a lot of snags just to get things working properly.
Thanks for the links. When I come back from lunch, I'll play around with the beta build of the editor to see if its stable enough to follow along with the cgcookie courses.
I've played around with the Unreal editor a little bit, but not enough to properly judge its stability with a long term project.
I hear you on the general purpose courses being mostly theory. Although I would argue that theory still has great value on this subject. Each game engine places a different set of limitations onto the artist. If the courses here stick to Unity, then maybe I'll write a blog post for 'Member Stories' on game engines later... I have not yet settled on a 3D game engine for my personal project, so I should be playing around with a few more than just Unity and Unreal.
General courses are something I'd like to teach, but they'd focus more on broad subjects in games. Things like teaching how to write organized and well thought out code or how to write a great game design document when brainstorming a game. Even things like designing AI can be taught to be applied to many areas in software.
General design is something that would work well since it can be software agnostic. It's somewhat similar to how the concept art side is taught here, while we do teach using Photoshop, most of what is taught doesn't apply directly to photoshop and that's because it can be done with any software with similar tools and could even be done on paper.