Astro Academy: How We're Leveling Up a New Generation of Game Creators

If you were building a creative platform that lets anyone make games from scratch by describing them, it'd be totally reasonable to think the technology would be the biggest challenge. It'd also be totally wrong. It's a lesson we learned first hand, after years in the trenches building Astrocade, and it hit us about 10 seconds after we launched: no matter how magical the tool, it still takes skill to put it to good use. Seemingly overnight, our greatest strength was emerging as our greatest challenge as well. After all, when you lower the barrier so dramatically that everyone can participate, you're also making traditional standards of quality much harder to achieve.

But what if we want both? What if we insist upon keeping the door open to creators from all backgrounds, whether or not they've written a single line of code, while also ensuring players enjoy an endless library of playable, fun, and unique games? It became clear that if we were going to pour our hearts and souls into a tool that will change gaming forever, it was our responsibility to teach creators how to squeeze every last drop of potential out of it.

That realization was the first step towards creating Astro Academy.

Astro Academy: Leveling Up a New World of Creators

For decades, game developers have learned the tricks of the trade from doorstop-sized books, university courses, communities of fellow creators, and of course, years of trial and error. And while much of that is inevitable—you simply can't master a skill as technical and complex as game development overnight—a great deal of the burden is simply the result of game development being an extraordinarily advanced engineering task. Long before one has the luxury of thinking about rules, characters, or world building (you know, the fun part) they have to get up to speed writing code, understanding hardware like GPUs, and making sense of a seemingly endless series of libraries, frameworks, and APIs.

Astrocade has been designed from the ground up to deliver the opposite experience, in which the fun part is the only part. But this got us halfway to our goal. As we quickly learned, even when the engineering is stripped away entirely, there's no guarantee the result will be fun to play. It became clear to us that after years of investing in the technology underlying our platform, it was time to start investing in the people putting it to use as well.

Working with a combination of gaming industry vets (some of whom are already part of the team) while learning everything data tells us about success on Astrocade in particular, we created a fast, effective curriculum that teaches our creators everything they need to know to be set up for success.

Astro Academy covers a lot of ground quickly, and we're always refining it to deliver even more useful information while keeping distractions to an absolute minimum. But its core is the kind of timeless wisdom that game developers have spent generations honing:

• Ensuring a game's TTF—”time to fun”—is as low as possible. Astro Academy creators are encouraged to get their players to a uniquely fun moment within the first 5-10 seconds.
• Reducing a game's download times until they're as close to instant as possible, everywhere in the world (even when the local internet sucks). Astrocade is a global platform, and that means ensuring even the most remote players feel catered to.
• Designing a game's progression thoughtfully, balancing increasing difficulty with novelty and regular changes in visuals and tone.
• Refining a strong foundation of a game with “juice”—special effects, feedback, and polished gamefeel—that makes a game resonate with players on a visceral level.

But the most important part is the process itself. Astro Academy stresses the value in perfecting a core mechanic first, then building from the inside out, saving polish and extra features for the final stages. And at each step, creators are encouraged to play test as much as they can—friends, family, or fellow creators on our community Discord. This is all much easier said than done, of course, but Astro Academy goes to great lengths to put usable, reliable techniques for achieving them in the hands of every creator who takes the course.

Balancing Casual Fun with Real Skill Development

Upstart game developers often complain of being stuck in “tutorial hell” when learning the ropes of a new platform. Of course, in a world of coding and manual asset creation this is inevitable. Astrocade has always strived to offer the fastest, easiest, most empowering path to results, though, which means even our approach to learning is intended to be as painless as possible.

That's why Astro Academy Lessons are a combination of short videos (most around five minutes or so) and brief, visual lesson guides that can generally be read and understood in less than 20 minutes. Each has a tangible goal with obvious value, whether it's making the core of your game more fun, ensuring it loads faster, or designing a rewarding sense of progression. Along the way, quizzes and interactive assignments keep students moving and making measurable progress.

The real highlight of the course, though, is delivered daily via our increasingly popular Office Hours sessions in which attendees are encouraged to ask questions and share their games. Astrocade team members attend regularly, helping play test students' work, answering questions about the platform, and even collecting feedback for new features.

Making it Memorable

Finally, Astro Academy is an opportunity to show our creators how much they mean to us, and how much we care about their success. So rather than throw a virtual badge or Discord flare at our graduates and call it a day, we lean hard into ceremony, recognition, and, simply put, the sheer fun of some good swag.

Graduates are shipped a high-quality, physical copy of their diploma—complete with a hologram seal, obviously the most important indication of any degree's worth—along with commemorative goodies like stickers and an exclusive Astro Academy alumni shirt.

Astro Academy Graduates at Work

Ultimately, of course, game quality is the only real metric of Astro Academy's impact. Fortunately, our graduates have already gone on to create some of the platform's best games, often citing specific lessons and techniques as especially helpful. Play some of their recent hits yourself:

• Pickaxe Palooza by creator @archeologist
• Slime Siege by creator @Pikaa.Pi
• Rail Rider by creator @BeLittle

Join Us!

Interested in attending Astro Academy? Join our Discord and get started today.