Topic: Education in Game Development

[Smoke39]

I meant to make a thread about this topic the last time I mentioned that I'd transfered out of DigiPen but never got around to it.  Essentially, I thought a lot of their professors weren't very good, and I got the impression that their curriculum wasn't very well developed.

Anyway.

Quote
Originally posted by: Kairon
That's interesting to hear coming from an established place like digipen smoke. I expected a growing program and a develop curriculum at a place where games majors are newly implemented, like the DeVry I'm going to, but to hear that Digipen itself is still working out kinks makes me quite curious. Of course, industry professionals are preferable in Games teachers, and we have some good ones, but in addition to experience in the field they also need to be good teachers on top of that, which makes it doubly hard to find great mentors. I'm looking forward to next semester when one of my teachers I really enjoyed from first semester will be teaching us again.

But yeah... I'd love to read more about your project Smoke. The one thing I've decided upon in all this time is that no matter how good the education plan or teachers around you, it's your own efforts above and beyond what's asked of you that'll dictate your success. More than 50% of the new games students we get are gone before their first semester is over.

Regarding the curriculum, one thing that stood out was when they moved a second-year class (game implementation techniques, I think it was called) to the second semester.  The first day of class, the guy who was to teach the class, Ian Lewis, I think his name was, from the XBox team, learned from us that while we had learned C, we had never actually written anything in it yet.  This was obviously a shock to him, and he had to completely change the content of the class.

Besides that we were never really taught anything about programming games in our game programming labs.  Instead, we had one suit and two designers ramble on about various documents, reports, and idiotically obvious things about game design (your menus should be user friendly, hur hur).  Occasionally we'd be given vague engine design advice like "Make it modular" or "Make it data-driven," but were never given any guidence as to how one might go about doing these things.  I think object factories were mentioned in passing a few times in the fourth semester, but were never actually explained.

Your point about experience not necessarily leading to being a good teacher is a good one.  The majority of my professors seemed like they were perfectly knowledgably in their field, but many of them were terrible teachers.  One of my professors actually got fired half-way through the semester because he was so incompetent.

I also understand your point about personal efforts.  However, I didn't feel like I was getting my money's worth out of DigiPen.  Figuring things out on your own is one thing.  Paying money to have someone tell you to figure something out on your own is another.  So now I'm persuing a regular ol' computer science degree and casually experimenting with SDL to write a 2D game engine on my own.  We'll see where that takes me.

Also, since you brought up drop rates, DigiPen's is apparently pretty high, too.  One of my roommates my first year actually left before school even started.  I can't really blame him; orientation seemed like it was aimed at purposefully driving people away.

You can read some random junk on my DigiPen projects, as well as download them, at the games section of my website.  I don't have anything up for Silhouette Apparatus right now.  It really didn't turn out as we had hoped.  Explore the rest of my site at your own risk.

[ShyGuy]

I always thought if I was to get involved in game development, I would want to take the Kurt Schilling route: http://videogames.yahoo.com/celebrity-byte/curt-schilling/514606

Of course, I think I would need about ten or twenty million dollars first...

[Kairon]

Yeah, the critical question for anyone wanting to go to a games school is this: Am I willing to make this specialized and relatively untested degree work and program my butt off both in and out of class, or... is it wiser to take a regular computer science course and get a strong general foundation in an established, but non-specific curriculum and try to learn all the game specific stuff I can on my own outside of class?

The first option puts the impetus on you to know that you're doing what you really want to be doing, it depends on you to make yourself succeed on your own terms because a game programming degree is... somewhat non-transferrable to other fields. It's sort of an all-or-nothing deal.

The second option gives you a way out in case you don't really a burning passion; Computer Science is the sort of general degree that can take you elsewhere. But this option is likely to give you almost no structure in which to be introduced to games concepts and you'll likely be having to find your own resources and figure out stuff on your own without guidance, and any connections you make with mentors or people in the field will have to come purely from your own efforts.

[Crimm]

You know, a friend of mine is getting her MS at DigiPen.  I think she said it was A.I. but I don't remember for sure.  All she ever says about the place is trying to hurdle herself over to the Nintendo building.  I'll ask her and see if she feels the same way.

[Smoke39]

I'm not sure I agree with you there, Kairon.  To program a game you have to be able to program in general.  That's why DigiPen calls their degree "real-time interactive simulation" instead of something like "game programming."  It reflects the broad scope of what you're learning, even if games are what initially draw you in.  I think that's also why DigiPen has such a heavy workload; it's like a normal CS degree plus the RTIS stuff on top of that.