Hi everyone! I wondered… How should game developer school look like, which whould actually be effective and “work”?
If you have some random idea for that school, just post it in there.
Here are my few cents:
This school can not be general, and on some stage (second year?) study whould have to be divided between graphics, coding and gamedesigning profiles, leaving only few subjects to share for all of the classes.
From my point of view, game designing is not only about skills. So in first year, I would not hesitate putting heavy maths on those who are never actually going to use them - future concept artists, for example, because it develops concetration and solving skills a lot. And coder, who can not prototype GUI himself, is worthless is some way too.
Also, team work is important, so I guess at the end of every year, each class whould have to make some complete little game, to see results of their study.
I’ve recently been perusing through several game design school offerings. One of the better ideas I saw was they run two classes. One for artists and one for programmers. ‘Game Design Theory’ per se is shared between both classes, but obviously each class gets to specialise in their chosen field. Then towards the end of the course, both teams collaborate on a big project or get divided into teams to each make smaller projects.
I think this is a great way for a school to work as well as giving the students some near-real work experiences in the sense they are building something and collaborating with other teams/skill sets.
What has “heavy maths” got to do with anything? Programming is translation, not mathematics.
In my years as a programmer, I never once found a use for anything other than basic Boolean logic, algebra and a little of vector maths. Every formula I needed had already been worked out and written down somewhere: I just had to look it up in a book, or online. (I stopped programming for money in the late '90s, so books were my usual resource back then.) This still holds true today. The vast majority of game development companies aren’t interested in hiring 3D graphics programmers. That’s what middleware companies are for.
This would serve no purpose. Nobody in industry hires people and groups people together by the year they applied for their job.
A class is just a random assortment of people who happen to have chosen the same course. A team is a group of people who have complementary skills. What if your class in a particular year is mostly comprised of artists or programmers, but has no wannabe designers?
If you’re going to try to teach team-working, award additional points for team-produced projects in some of your coursework, and make sure the evidence of teamwork is clear when those points are awarded. Don’t just go for the tiresome cop-out of saying, “Right! This next project is a class project! You’re ALL going to work together on this one!” This only teaches office politics, not “teamwork”.