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.

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.

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 .

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.