I am someone who can talk about game and software development all day long. I love diving deep into the details and techniques ranging from design theory to software optimization1.
I’m also a huge fan of helping people and solving problems. This is why a huge part of my career, especially at Helpful Human, was spent supporting my team and offering mentorship or guidance to our junior developers.
One of my favorite things is experiencing the “aha!” moment when someone finally understands a concept or technique that’s been eluding them. I hadn’t experienced much of that feeling since I left Helpful Human…
Until I worked on Grave Danger with Jack Sather.
After Jack’s video on Grave Danger was released, we received some comments and messages asking that I consider making tutorials. Jack and I had immediately jumped into working on our next game, but did discuss the idea of potentially doing educational content in the future.
Then we hit some snags in our timing of jumping into full-time game development together. Jack makes his primary living off of YouTube, which requires an immense amount of time and effort to maintain, and I currently rely on ad-hoc contract work to pay the bills.
Trying to meet our existing needs while committing to a near full-time schedule of game development was quickly becoming untenable. So we decided to put the game on hold while Jack took a break to focus on his own learning journey2 and producing content for his channel.
My bank account wasn’t looking too hot either, so I decided to take on some part time contract work to refill the coffers as I figured out my next steps.
I’ve considered doing educational content before. In fact this was an avenue I had recently considered as a potential outcome of my fantasy console project.
But creating educational content is a big question of format and formula. It’s not enough to know what to teach, but how to teach in a way that meets the needs of your student3. It also requires some level of vulnerability unless you’re going to hide behind written text and a pen name.
As someone new to game development, Jack had spent a significant amount of time attempting to learn from tutorials. While working together and tutoring him on different concepts, he would often point out his frustrations with the existing content he had tried to learn from.
As someone whose been doing this for a long time, I knew exactly what he was talking about. Programming is a tricky thing to teach, and one that benefits from a mixed media approach. Afterall code itself is text, so parts of it are best taught through written form, right? Except… some concepts are better described through analogies with visualizations4.
On the other hand, videos are great for conceptual or high-level overview stuff, but tend to be a poor medium for reference purposes after the initial viewing5. Videos have a fixed length and are linear in nature, meaning the time spent sitting on watching a video needs to be concise and entertaining to some degree.
I felt that I might be able to offer a new approach to teaching that levaraged the best of both worlds. I would try to create videos6 that focused on running through concepts at a higher-level while also providing a written version of the content that would be more in-depth and serve as a reference.
Initially my plan was to create videos covering a variety of topics in game development, but not with any explicit goal or narrative. Around this time I had been modeling some stuff using the Nintendo 64 style7 and Jack made the suggestion that doing a Zelda-style8 game would be a unique idea.
That was all the motivation I needed to dive into creating a demo project that I could use to derive the curriculum for the course. From that point on (in November 2024) I busted my ass writing code, modeling and texturing 3D assets, and creating animations that emulated the ones found in Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask.
This even led to me getting so frustrated with Blender’s animation tools that I created a custom solution to make the process significantly better. This is something I plan to release to the Playable Workshop community.
After I had enough of the project done, I began breaking it apart to figure out how I would teach it. At this point I was outlining potential scripts and figuring out the “routing”9 of what to cover and when in order to balance the lecture and practice portions10 of the learning process.
I’ve not really done video content before, so figuring out how to present this side of things was a new challenge for me. The post-production aspects were definitely easier, aside from working with keyframes in DaVinci Resolve, Fusion, and to a lesser extent, Apple Motion11.
This meant I didn’t have much video gear either, so I cobbled together a solution using my iPhone and Apple’s new camera connection feature.
I’ve worked on a lot of things, but always behind the scenes. I’ve never really put myself on camera before, let alone to speak as an authority on a topic. So talking to an invisible audience through a camera lens was insanely uncomfortable.
I immediately got anxious and my whole demeanor changed. I sounded like I was doing an impression of a YouTuber, because I was. To force myself to get used to this process, I decided to get some practice by doing an intro video that would also allow me to gauge interest in the concept.
The intro video went over pretty well and gave me a lot of great practice, but still didn’t solve the issue of talking to an imaginary classroom. It was just selling an idea, not teaching anything. I pushed forward with the belief that I would somehow figure it out as I made the first episode.
Which I must re-recorded around 10 times, and I hated it more each time.
The content was just overly rehearsed voice overs telling viewers what to do. It sounded like every other tutorial or lecture video I’ve seen out there. This idea was quickly becoming far more stressful than I had anticipated, especially since it felt like something that could be so fun in the beginning.
While thinking out loud to various people, I realized that I do much better teaching a student directly. Someone who can ask genuine questions and require me to just explain things in a way that makes sense to them. Someone whose energy I can bounce off of and help me tune my own delivery in real time.
So I approached Jack with an idea knowing that it would require a huge time commitment from him: Be my on-screen student asking the questions you would ask.
Thankfully he was willing to give it a shot and we did a test run. It turned out to be a significantly better experience for me, and a fun one for him too.
At this time he had been looking for a way to keep working on his own game development skills while he took a break from working on an actual game. Collaborating on this moving forward could be a win-win for both of us, so we pushed forward and finished the episode together.
The response has been overwhelmingly positive so far. People are excited about the content and changing up the dynamic by having a teacher and student on-screen was one of the best decisions we could’ve made. It’s incredibly validating to see that the approach we chose is resonating with viewers.
As it turns out, this is a near full-time job too, but it’s a different type of work compared to making a game. And while it’s a lot of work to do this, it’s also really fun and exciting.
I believe this could be the coolest thing I ever do in my career and I’m stoked to keep going. We’re actively working on the next set of episodes and we have a lot of ideas of what we can offer our community moving forward.