/Babycastles-Academy

Lesson plans, notes from our Babycastles Academy public education programs

Babycastles-Academy

Lesson plans and notes from our Babycastles Academy public education programs

This repo contains the Babycastles Academy Manual for workshop teachers and individual lesson plans for each workshop.

Vision

Babycastles Academy events are weekend afternoon workshops (and sometimes game jams or talks) on topics related to artist-focused game development, world-building and the intersection of art and technology. Workshops can be experienced individually or as a series to learn a broad range of skills and techniques. Our audience is a broad community of creative practitioners from visual artists, musicians, sculptors, programmers, dancers, performers, poets, writers and those who may not self-identity as having any particular relevant skills but are interested in learning.

Rather than the approach of professional game production companies, our focus is game design as an artist creation process akin to the handcrafted process of building zines, paintings, art films and theater. We see game creation as a medium synthesizing visual design, sound, sculpture, programming and performance. Never one to be boxed in by hard definitions, our workshops include topics, skills and techniques that go beyond strictly games. Past workshops include skills in setting goals, workshops in Python, and more. Traditional game-design workshops or classes diverge greatly from this approach, and are pricey, inaccessible to the diverse community we aim to serve.

While we’ve found success as an artist-run space dedicated to games, we’ve always been proud to be representative of a broader community that is not always represented by the Game Industry. Our workshops aim to serve this broad community of individuals of many intersectional identities across gender, race, class, age, ability.

Workshops

Recordings of Babycastles Academy workshops on YouTube

Support

*This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council.

Babycastles Academy is also supported by workshop participants and by the members of Babycastles. For more information on donation or to become a member, visit our page on withfriends.