Game Development Education: The Dream
I have a lot of dreams about what I’d like to see in the future. One of the strongest dreams involves game development education. To put it bluntly, I’ve been unimpressed by what I’ve seen so far. There are a number of courses around but none of them have stood out as being amazingly good. Quite a few are too young to determine how good they are, but suffice to say, looking through resume’s of people, there’s no golden bullet of educational institute that guarantee’s a certain quality of programmer. So what does my dream involve, and how is it going to change the way games are made?
Pie in the Sky
At the most extreme level, the perfect education program would be one attached to a large development studio. Imagine if Valve had “Valve Education” where you could do a 1 year course and learn everything they know about game development. Developers from live teams could take time off to teach for a while, to mix up their lives and to pass on their knowledge to others. While it would make quite a bit of money, the key thing here is that the top x% of students could be hired straight into Valve. Think of it as a 1 year probation period, where the employee PAYS to be there. If there are things you don’t like about game programmers in the world at the moment you have the ability to teach them what you want. Have a subject devoted solely to software practices, and fail any of the kids that aren’t up to it.
Down to earth
So if you’re not Gabe, then the above paragraph may be a little out of reach for you. Don’t lose hope though, because there’s room in my dream for a less restrictive model. The main ingredient for me is to find passionate developer’s who can also teach other programmers. Seniors and leads out there should be doing it all the time, and we just have to get them together to start teaching students. With the average length of service in the games industry being 5 years, there’s a great opportunity here. Firstly, it means that it IS worth training up kids as there are a lot of positions that need to be filled by people that don’t have any real world experience in games. Secondly, it means that there are a lot of developers burning out and wanting to leave. Rather than going off and becoming business programmers, why not give them the opportunity to use their precious game dev skills.
What’s needed here is a bunch of truly experienced developers getting together and teaching kids exactly what they need to know to make games. In 1-3 years, the kids should be able to pump out a handful of little games, and one big collaborative game at the end. Heck, you could even sell the large game at the end and give the students a discount on their fees based on how well it sells.
Bureaucracy and Money
The biggest issue I see with current game dev courses is the amount of bureaucracy that’s involved in setting up the course. It’s obviously going to be better to have the course meet requirements for a Bachelor’s degree or equivalent, but try not to let this ruin the course itself. From what I’ve seen in courses there is a lot of irrelevant material taught. If this HAS to be taught then do it quickly, and get it out of the road. The key here is teaching kids how to make games, and make them well. If the course is set up to make money then there’s a good chance it’s not going to work. The main focus here needs to be making good game programmers. Once you start pumping out awesome programmer’s I guarantee you their tuition fees will be the smallest part of your income. You’ll have people wanting to pay top dollar for your students, people will want to start advertising to your students to use their tech and you could even secure a deal with a certain large video card manufacturer to focus your education on their cards.
Conclusion
There is a massive market for game development education at the moment, a vacuum I see filling very quickly. I just hope that at least some of the new courses are better than the ones I’ve already heard about. So there is my dream. I’m a little too poor and busy right now to set this up, so I’m leaving it for anyone else to try. Let me know how you do and we can work out the commission I get later. 
That’s a great dream!
(Didn’t stop me from using it though!)
I know first-hand what it’s been like in a programming course where a lot of irrelevant stuff has been taught – like an Audio/Video stream where we learn about making After Effect documents. Business and Marketing modules were also thrown into the mix, otherwise the course wasn’t allowed to run. My C++ teacher was more familiar with C and Java and didn’t want students using VS8 because it wasn’t an open source IDE
That said, experience within the game development environment and knowledge of that environment can best prepare you to work within the games industry.
Being taught by industry professionals and provided with work experience within game companies will give prospective employees a better understanding of everything from good ood design principles, project management, working with crunch, to standard programming conventions, the maths you really need for game programming, and working with state-of-the-art development and graphical tools.
Alexandra-
Thanks
. I think part of the problem with having teachers as bad as yours is the age old “If you can, do. If you can’t, teach”. While I think that this can be true for some people, I’ve also seen first-hand how having people take a year or so off “real world” work to go teach is an excellent way of passing the informatoin on.
One thing I did forget to mention which you touched on was getting real world work experience. If a company like Valve ran the course, or even sponsored it then you could use the Source engine to teach students giving them experience in something that real world, awesome games are being made in.
Hope whatever course you decide to do in the future turns out to be much better
.
I know your pain on this, Doolwind. As a hirer on in the local industry, a game focused education was more likely to be a negative than a positive. But that’s not just because of concerns aboutthe quality of education — after seeing how some of these courses were run, and meeting the people responsible, I’ve been left with deep concerns about whether these courses are a kind of “easy way out” for young up and comers, something that might attract the lazy, rather than the dedicated. I would generally have more confidence in a traditional comp. sci or software education.
For those consider how they should education themselves, I would strongly suggest considering something like this:
1. Take a Computer Science or Software Engineering course in the best Uni you can get into — be prepared to move. Melbourne Uni or Charles Stuart are options, or even consider overseas education.
2. Make sure you’re in the top 10% of your class. It’s a competitive industry, you need to stand out
3. Consider including maths and physics classes
4. Consider a post graudate game course, such as those at the AIE in Melbourne
If you follow the above steps, I would say that you have a good chance of entering the industry, and hitting the ground running.
If you have to consider a game college or game course, then do this first. Ask to speak to the lecturers. Find out about their qualifications. Ask this questions: Why should you teach me? What qualifications do you have? How can you claim industry relevant expertise? If all the lecturers don’t have many years of experience within the industry, if they haven’t been a part of big name successful games, if they don’t have traditional teaching experience, or if they don’t have traditional teaching qualifications, then you need to think very carefully about walking away. Think very carefully before signing up with Quantm.
Remember, if you make the wrong choice, it could cost you 3 or 4 of the best years of your life. Be very demanding of your educators.
I always meant to write an angry post to one of the locally read forums urging young people to be especially carefully about education options, due to the number of dangerously unprepared courses I’ve come across. Perhaps I’ll write something on my blog.
DJ~
You make some great points. I’d also urge people to take the time to investigate and think about their options before jumping into anything. I’d also recommend that people try and put together a reasonable game demo while doing any of these courses as this will teach you a lot, show future employee’s your skills and seriousness and help you decide if you really want to make games for a living.