Five free courses: dabble in the arts, or something smart…
 Over 4 Hours of Game Art Tutorials!
In this new video tutorial series, we’re going teach you how to draw pinball game art or ANY kind of top down viewed game art. So fear not, if you have no interest in creating a pinball game, you’ll still enjoy this series as we cover dozens of illustration techniques for Adobe Animate or Adobe Flash. Our pinball table will have a mostly-top down viewed perspective, with some 2.5D leaning angles toward the top. So by the end of the course you should feel comfortable drawing objects directly overhead or with a slight angle.
We’ll cover everything you’d expect to see a pinball table illustration course: the main table walls, ramps, bumpers, flippers, plungers, lights, table decoration and even some sillier things (like a giant bear head for the ball to roll through). We’ll also spend sometime animating objects like the bumpers, lights, even a waterfall.
This course is definitely for new users of Adobe Flash or Adobe Animate, as we’ll take things pretty darn slow in the beginning to get you used to drawing with the vector tools.
Three Lengthy Web Frameworks Video Tutorials….
Get started becoming a true web “master” with three new courses for 2016 from our coding guru, Lawrence Turton.
- Javascript Essentials – Learn the essentials of the world’s number one programming language, Javascript.Â
- Introduction to SASSÂ – SASS or SCSS is fast becoming a more prominent language in web development and gets rid of the headaches that come with traditional CSS.
- PHP 7 – This course focuses on the new features of PHP 7 which sports new syntax to the language, improved security and nearly doubles the speed of PHP 5 with the new PHPNG compiler.
All registered CartoonSmart students can enroll in free Lifetime Access for these courses from their account.Â
Swift 2 and Sprite Kit Basics
Jumpstart your knowledge of Swift 2, SpriteKit and Xcode 7 with this simple, quickly-paced series of lessons. In just 90 minutes, you’ll be tossing around physics-based objects in a SpriteKit based project, ready to start production on your first game or app.
These first five video tutorials will teach you how to get setup in Xcode, and start programming with Swift right away. To get the most of it, you should be using Xcode 7 (or higher) and programming in Swift 2 (although Swift 1.2 would be fine as well). We’ll talk about basic programming concepts in Swift 2, such as variables, functions, optionals, arrays, and dictionaries.
In the next seven video tutorials we will discuss Swift 2 with Sprite Kit. Topics include using SKSpriteNodes, safely casting types, subclassing, physics bodies, SKCameraNodes, SKActions, detecting SKPhysicsContacts and more. And in this section, we’ll really begin to have some fun!
Start Collecting Your CartoonSmart Training in One Place
After you’ve enrolled in at least one course, even a free one, you’ll be able to access Your Account.  Here you can quickly check your course progress, vote in polls, sign up for more free courses when available, and much more!
Become a Part of the Community
Signing up for our free courses will also allow you to participate in our new community of developers. Just launched this past March, we’ve added forums for students to ask us and each other development-related questions. And we’ve got some just-for-fun sections as well.