If you’ve played video games for any significant amount of time, you’ve probably been interested in starting to program your own games. For most people, this feeling is fleeting and quickly goes away, but for others it just seems like the natural next step to take in their hobby. The only problem is game programming seems so complicated, so most of us give up before we even start. Well, I’m here today to tell you about a free, easy path into game programming, and it starts with StackSocial.
StackSocial is, at its core, a deals site. Faithful My Dpad readers might remember that StackSocial was offering that deep discount on Windscribe that we wouldn’t shut up about. StackSocial is a great place to find deals on all sorts of things, from web hosting plans to phone cases to lifetime memberships to the School of Game Design. StackSocial doesn’t just highlight deals, though, they also highlight freebies. This is where the magic happens for prospective game developers.
You see, right now, StackSocial’s offering a bunch of freebies, from a MacOS software bundle to a discount on socks. They are also offering multiple programming bundles. Whether you want to learn HTML5, Java, Ruby, JavaScript, or GoLang, you can go sign yourself up for some free courses right now.
What’s the catch?
There is one catch, but it’s really not that bad and it doesn’t cost any money. Before you can get these deals, you first have to make a StackSocial account (for free), then you have to share the deals on Facebook or Twitter. I know, I know, nobody wants to be that social media spammer cluttering up their friends’ timelines with promotional posts. Luckily, to get around this, you can just share each deal on Facebook and set the individual post’s privacy settings so that only you can see the post. You can easily achieve this from StackSocial’s site, and it ensures you won’t bother any of your friends.
Once you’ve shared the deal to your (visible to only you) Facebook timeline, you will be sent an email with a link to sign up for the course. All of these courses are offered on StackSocial’s StackSkills site, where online courses like this are hosted. StackSkills accounts are also free, and while they sell a ton of courses you don’t have to pay for anything to access your free courses.
Now that you know that you don’t have to bother your friends or reach into your wallet to get these courses, go ahead and sign up for a few! If you’ve always wanted to learn how to develop a game in, say, HTML5, there’s no better (or cheaper) way to do it than signing up for these free courses. Go on and turn your game-playing hobby into a game development hobby, and see where it takes you.
