The Core Certification is a four part course offered by Manticore Games. Along with the certification they offer six other courses (at the time of writing) and a bootcamp. All offerings free of charge. Manticore Games, established by industry veterans from EA, Blizzard, Respawn, Xfire, Roblox, Trion Worlds, Crystal Dynamics and Zygna, is the developer and operator of CORE. CORE is a free, all-in-one platform for game Creators offering access to the full power of the Unreal Engine, thousands of free, professional music, art, and sound assets, and an industry-leading monetization system.
Game Development Playground
CORE is not going to be your long term go to game development platform. The biggest thing to understand about the platform is it’s very closed off. It is designed to allow you to build games with little difficulty yet be powerful enough to make them great. However your game(s) will live in CORE, you won’t be able to port them to consoles or mobile apps anytime soon.
One of the biggest bonuses to CORE is the community. Jumping into CORE you’ll find tons of games built by other community members to play. You don’t have to be a game developer to play any of the thousands of games. While in CORE you’ll gain XP and level up your player as well. There are plenty of options to customize your avatar, which will be used to play most of the CORE games.
Certification
Should you chose to become a game designer in CORE the certification program is ready to get you up and running. You learn the basics of properties, learn to create your own objects (kitbashing), model the terrain and learn some Lua coding. The courses are all text driven and not very long. You’ll be asked to pass quizzes along the way as well as submit your work for review. It is a four part course that will challenge your ability, but not to a frustrating degree. I found challenging myself to create the best work I can to be a lot of fun. You can see some of the work I submitted on this page or check out my CORE profile page.
Game development is not easy but CORE removes as much as it can to get you up and running. I have been looking at CORE since it was launched early last year. As I began my game developer journey I decided to check it out once again. I won’t lie I’m a sucker for a certification so that helped quite a bit. Much like the courses I’m taking at Zenva I like the structure of the certification. It’s nice to see they are adding additional courses to supplement and take your learning further as well.
The Next Fortnite
Of course I have my game idea for CORE. I know it will be slightly challenging to complete. I need to dive deeper into Lua coding to make it work. However the CORE Certification has helped me to have a direction to get started. I will be starting things like level design very soon. Perhaps understanding CORE development will also help me if I delve into Unreal in the future. In the early stages of being a game developer I would like to have some small projects under my belt. I look forward to building my first CORE game and playing with my friends, hopefully it’s enjoyed by others as well.
