I just completed module 13 from "Introduction to Video Games Creation" from XAMK, and I must be honest – it was a horrendous experience. I would not recommend this module to anyone at all. And this not because of tons of mistypes and frequent incomprehensible English.
The training has a "presentation" and a quiz. And a page with some description for both. None of them agree on the number of questions: you can see numbers like 30, 35 and 40 in text, but then the actual quiz has 43 questions (with somehow 100% considered when you hit 40/40 of questions). But that's fine, presentation is "v13" (which already makes very poor English inexcusable), maybe the number changed throughout the years.
What is not fine is that it does not really have a clear purpose. There are 82 slides in this presentation (you can check it out here), and most of them seem completely unrelated to each other. There are even slides that a literally tag clouds. What am I supposed to learn from those? New words?
Some of the slides present definitions, which, if you are able to decipher the wording, may not be exactly correct. Or it may not be the slides themselves, but a question and the correct answer to it in the quiz. For example, definition of "pay-to-win" is actually more of a definition of "free-to-play" in general, it does not cover anything of what makes "pay-to-win" an undesirable strategy for user acquisition (if not user retention). But then it also lists "game genre" as a reason to want to pay for in-game stuff. Since when? Give me an example of a genre, that makes people pay for it just because it is that genre.
But again, those minor mistakes here and there may have been more tolerable, since there are links to some articles about related statistics, which could be useful. The problem is that through out all of the slides I did not understand what we are really talking about and what is the real message. Even the conclusion did not seem to have a real connection to what has been discussed/showed before it.
As a good game has a good "flow" (which is barely described in the presentation, BTW), good training has a "flow" too. No, not "training" even, a more general "presentation". There needs to be some logic when going from 1 slide to the next one. And each slide (or, at least, a combination of those) needs to have a clear message, like: "This slide aims to explain you this thing". And then you do understand that "thing". It will not happen if you see a random tag cloud or some cutouts about Tolkien.
Module 11 of the course was already quite contentious, but even its selection of games made some sense, there was some justification on why each game was selected to the list (even though a few times it was mostly "Because it's my list", which is poor taste). In this module… It felt like mostly random collection of facts and opinions.
Maybe I am missing something, but I did not like this module at all.
