{"id":84,"date":"2007-11-13T16:20:24","date_gmt":"2007-11-13T06:20:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/?p=84"},"modified":"2007-11-13T16:20:24","modified_gmt":"2007-11-13T06:20:24","slug":"game-development-education-the-dream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/game-development-education-the-dream\/","title":{"rendered":"Game Development Education: The Dream"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have a lot of dreams about what I’d like to see in the future.\u00a0 One of the strongest dreams involves game development education.\u00a0 To put it bluntly, I’ve been unimpressed by what I’ve seen so far.\u00a0 There are a number of courses around but none of them have stood out as being amazingly good.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 So what does my dream involve, and how is it going to change the way games are made?<\/p>\n

Pie in the Sky<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the most extreme level, the perfect education program would be one attached to a large development studio.\u00a0 Imagine if Valve had “Valve Education” where you could do a 1 year course and learn everything they know about game development.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Think of it as a 1 year probation period, where the employee PAYS to be there.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Have a subject devoted solely to software practices, and fail any of the kids that aren’t up to it.<\/p>\n

Down to earth<\/strong><\/p>\n

So if you’re not Gabe, then the above paragraph may be a little out of reach for you.\u00a0 Don’t lose hope though, because there’s room in my dream for a less restrictive model.\u00a0 The main ingredient for me is to find passionate developer’s who can also teach other programmers.\u00a0 Seniors and leads out there should be doing it all the time, and we just have to get them together to start teaching students.\u00a0 With the average length of service in the games industry being 5 years, there’s a great opportunity here.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Secondly, it means that there are a lot of developers burning out and wanting to leave.\u00a0 Rather than going off and becoming business programmers, why not give them the opportunity to use their precious game dev skills.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Bureaucracy and Money<\/strong><\/p>\n

The biggest issue I see with current game dev courses is the amount of bureaucracy that’s involved in setting up the course.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 From what I’ve seen in courses there is a lot of irrelevant material taught.\u00a0 If this HAS to be taught then do it quickly, and get it out of the road.\u00a0 The key here is teaching kids how to make games, and make them well.\u00a0 If the course is set up to make money then there’s a good chance it’s not going to work.\u00a0 The main focus here needs to be making good game programmers.\u00a0 Once you start pumping out awesome programmer’s I guarantee you their tuition fees will be the smallest part of your income.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is a massive market for game development education at the moment, a vacuum I see filling very quickly.\u00a0 I just hope that at least some of the new courses are better than the ones I’ve already heard about.\u00a0 So there is my dream.\u00a0 I’m a little too poor and busy right now to set this up, so I’m leaving it for anyone else to try.\u00a0 Let me know how you do and we can work out the commission I get later. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have a lot of dreams about what I’d like to see in the future.\u00a0 One of the strongest dreams involves game development education.\u00a0 To put it bluntly, I’ve been unimpressed by what I’ve seen so far.\u00a0 There are a number of courses around but none of them have stood out as being amazingly good.\u00a0 Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[33,5,7],"tags":[27,112,79],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-game-development","category-games","category-personal","tag-education","tag-game-development","tag-valve"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pgEc5-1m","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}