Computer Games Development

Chicks

Hey,

I'm thinking of applying for this course next year, and I'd like to hear from anyone who's doing it/done it. As much info as you can give on what the course involves exactly would be fantastic!

RedXIV

Had a quick look there as there has been a few threads about this already that will give a fairly indepth view to it.

Might have changed slightly since the curriculum is constantly being updated but you'll get a good insight into it.

Link 1

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Link 4

Chicks

Cheers I read those threads, you're contributed a lot of information! Nice one! ^^ I hope you don't mind if I ask you a few more questions!

I've actually done a one year PLC course in game design and development, so I want to do a degree course in the same area now. I know what's involved and I'm prepared for it, so no worries there

To be honest I'm more interested in character/environment design than the programming side of things. I see that 3D graphics and audio is a subject in the course, which is cool, but in the other course I did a module involving storyboarding, level design and scripting cut scenes and I did a game proposal document at the end which I really enjoyed doing, is there anything like this in the course?

From what I've read about the course in Carlow IT it seems very programming focused, which is fine and I've done some of, but I'd also like to study other areas of development.

Work experience must be hard to find in Ireland for this course. Are your options for work experience placement mostly limited to QA based unpaid internships? Because that would quite frankly suck balls. I worked as a game tester for a year and a half but it's really not for me. I rocked at it, but it was more trouble than it was worth for the most part. Testing and not getting paid for it would be horrendous for me to say the least.

High drop out rates seem common in game design courses, there was only a handful of us left at the end of the one I did It was good though, there was so few of us we had almost one-on-one tutoring! lol

Anyway, I suppose my question is how much emphasis is there on other aspects of development besides programming?

RedXIV

Being honest? I wouldn't recommend this course if you are looking at the design elements. I realise there is graphic and audio modules but these are still programming based, how to display basic shapes, using shaders etc from code.

We did a module on animation which basically ended up with us doing the tutorials for Maya's modelling tool to pass. And we did a very small part of level design and character design but no storyboards etc. We did alot of documents too, but thats normal in college. I'm not saying you wouldn't learn alot but I think if you were to go into the design part, there are better courses for you to avail of. I think there is one in DIT after opening up in game design as well as a good one in Ballyfermot I've heard too.

Work exp is an absolute pain IF you need to stay in Ireland. If you can afford to go elsewhere then I would HUGELY recommend that. Ireland is primarily QA, especially for games companies. And a large percentage of them are localization QA places meaning that if you don't have a second language, don't bother applying. In saying that, there were some great opportunities for some people who did the course, one guy went to Hawaii, myself and another student were literally one step away from 3 months in Reno, Nevada (a visa issue stopped us ) and quite a few went to England. If you want proper code work, it'll be difficult, you may get it with the likes of PopCap and Microsoft but I don't know any others that do it. In saying that, the vast majority of work exp is actually paid. But I guess it could be the thing that tips the balance, do you want to get paid or do you want to get exactly the experience you need? Being honest, unpaid relevant experience is definitely going to be better that paid irrelevant experience.

In a nutshell, my advice would be contact all the colleges, find the course directors and talk to them. In my experience, they are extremely helpful and you'd get a far better idea of whats on offer. And don't assume a course without "games" in the title won't get you into the industry.

If i can do anything else, please don't hesitate to ask

Chicks

Thanks a lot for your help dude, I really appreciate it I'll look into the courses you mentioned, see if I can find something more suited to what I'm looking to do