My Impressions of Zenva Courses

As many of you know, on my X profile I usually share packs of assets, courses, and books that I find online at good prices. Some time ago, a pack of Zenva courses appeared on Humble Bundle. Based on what I had read in Reddit forums, I warned in the post that the quality of the courses might not be what people expected. To my surprise, Pablo Farias (@pablofariasnew), founder of Zenva, asked me to give his courses a chance because he didn’t believe they deserved that criticism. So I decided to buy the Humble Bundle pack and take several of the courses to see firsthand whether the impression I had formed from Reddit was accurate or not.

The pack I bought contained a lot of Godot courses. It also had some Unity courses I had purchased a long time ago but hadn’t been able to take. In the end, out of all of them, I completed four courses:

• Tower Defender Game in Godot – Unit 1 – Base Game
• Tower Defender Game in Godot – Unit 2 – Enhanced Towers
• Intro to Visual Shaders in Godot 4
• The Complete Procedural Terrain Generation Unity Course

The first two are just over an hour and a half long, the shader one is barely an hour, while the procedural terrain generation course in Unity spans more than three and a half hours. It’s a sample very similar to what Zenva courses usually are—or at least the ones I’ve obtained in my bundles—generally ranging from one to four or five hours.

To my surprise, I have to say I liked them a lot. All the courses are well structured and cover the scope they promise. They don’t go deep, but what they explain is enough for you to understand what’s going on and practice it confidently in the editor yourself. Even the theoretical concepts, although explained quickly, are conveyed clearly, leaving you with the right idea—perfectly valid for going deeper on your own afterwards.

Of course, they are all in English, but they include subtitles in multiple languages, including Spanish. From what I’ve seen, the Spanish subtitle translation is very good. Even so, I preferred to watch them with English subtitles. The instructors have very clean pronunciation and are easy to understand, so I only used subtitles to check specific words when I got distracted. With subtitles, you’ll have no trouble following the course, no matter your native language. Although it would be great if this platform—and the others that publish courses—started doing what YouTube does and also translated the audio using AI. I don’t know what the production cost is for that, but when you come across one of those, with translated audio, they’re delightful, because the voice even sounds natural.

I tried checking the price of individual courses, but apparently you only have the option to subscribe annually, which gives you access to the entire course catalog. That subscription seems to cost about $59.70 per year. As for whether the price is worth it, I couldn’t really say, because it depends on the value they bring you based on where you are in your learning journey. In my specific case, I’ve already moved past the phase of general introductory courses. I typically go for intermediate courses that cover specific topics. That makes me more selective, so I tend to avoid subscriptions like Zenva’s. But if you’re getting started, it may be a good option to pay that price and have all the courses concentrated and readily available, instead of bouncing around the internet looking for tutorials. You can also do what I did and keep an eye out for the bundles Zenva releases fairly often. That would let you access their content without paying for a subscription you might not get your money’s worth from if you don’t have time to watch courses regularly. If you follow me on X, I’ll let you know when I hear about a new bundle ;-)

To sum up: I liked the Zenva courses. They are good quality. The comments I had read on Reddit are not justified, at least in my opinion. Personally, I’m sure I’ll buy more bundles as they come out. I’m glad I was able to correct my mistake—there aren’t that many quality options to be discarding one incorrectly.

Analysis of the book Game AI Pro 360 – Guide to Architecture

There are many books about artificial intelligence (AI), but not so many focused on its use in video game development. Among those, there are two types: introductory books and in‑depth ones. The one we are dealing with belongs to the second category. That’s why I don’t recommend it to anyone who hasn’t already sharpened their teeth on a good number of introductory books and tried implementing AI algorithms. Believe me, this book is not for starting to learn AI. In fact, none of the books in this collection are. With that warning out of the way, I’ll try to justify it by explaining what the book is about.

The book does not follow an overarching narrative. It will not guide you through a learning path. Instead, it is a compendium of expert articles, each with a format and level of detail very similar to academic papers. If you’ve ever had to process the RFC of a standard, the articles in this book will strongly remind you of that. The different articles focus on different implementations of decision‑making systems (finite state machines, behavior trees, task planners, etc.), although each approaches them differently.

It’s clear that the authors of each article are true experts. No one can dispute that. Each of them refers to implementations they have made in well‑known games. The problem is that, for whatever reason, most of the articles leave me with the feeling that the authors are holding back their best cards—that they’re not telling you everything. Sure, I imagine that a full explanation of the complete AI implementation for those AAA games wouldn’t fit in a book, let alone in a single article, but I finished the book with the impression that unless you are as much of an expert as the authors, you won’t be able to fill in the gaps they leave in their explanations. It’s a constant feeling of “Okay, I think I understand at a high level what you want to do, but how exactly is that implemented?”—and that’s where the article ends. It’s true that sometimes you get code snippets, but they tend to be fragments of interfaces or high‑level pseudocode.

I suppose we should at least be grateful that this book is a topic‑based compilation of the articles previously published in the earlier Game AI Pro series. At least the compilation has some thematic coherence. I didn’t read the older books, but if everything was mixed together, they must have been very confusing.

For all these reasons, I must warn you against this book if you are just entering the world of AI for video games. If that’s your case, I don’t think you’ll get anything useful from it. There are better options in which to invest your money and from which you will learn much more. I would only recommend this book to someone who has already been working professionally in this field for many years; and even then, I’m not sure whether the book’s content hasn’t already been surpassed by time.