Bachelor of Science (Honours) in Computer Games Development CW208

shadowcomplex

Is anyone doing or has anyone considered doing ths course?would like some feedback if anyone here is

http://www.itcarlow.ie/courses_detail.asp?id=27&top_section=2&lower_section=10&lower2_section=35&uid=itcarlow

Duggy747

Don't know anybody who did that course but a friend of mine did Bsc in Software Development in IT Sligo.

Did some games development course in England for a very short while afterwards and now he works for EA in the Criterion dept. outside of London. He actually worked on Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit :pac:

For once I actually read the credits in a game just to see his name!

Mr E

You'll probably get a better response from the Carlow IT forum.
There is already a thread there on the subject (with several other threads linked from that).

I'll move this thread there now.

Dboy85

Its a math and programming course with physics thrown in the mix too. Its pretty intensive but if your technically minded its an excellent course. Very little focus on the artistic side of games development but we do some animation and modelling to have an idea of how it all comes together. Dont be afraid of it is all I can say, all subjects tie into each other so your not learning sh1te for the sake of it like the leaving cert.
Hope this helps

Am currently in 1st year doing Software Development and our teacher if you like who does our hardware labs with us is the lecturer for programing in games development.

He said if you get a Degree in Software of Games its pretty much the same, you'll still be more then be able to get the same job.

Nolaner

come to the Software development side of things!! you'll love it =D

RealistSpy

Software development rock but 1st year is sooo boring!

Nolaner

yeah first year is pretty bad! dont wanna do all this random crap i just wanna code :P

Dboy85

Don't worry you'll be flat out coding in 1st year on the games course!

Nolaner

Dboy85 wrote: »

Don't worry you'll be flat out coding in 1st year on the games course!

that hurts my soul

Genghiz Cohen

Mak_United wrote: »

He said if you get a Degree in Software of Games its pretty much the same, you'll still be more then be able to get the same job.

Graduated from games 2 years ago.
HR manager at work said the people in the US are reluctant to hire Games grads, think they'll be bored.

Someone in the Software engineering course said 3rd year is like 1st year Games.

Name no names! pew pew pew

My thoughts are; get a degree in whatever (as long as it's relevant) then it's your portfolio that gets you jobs.

RedXIV

Genghiz Cohen wrote: »

Graduated from games 2 years ago.
HR manager at work said the people in the US are reluctant to hire Games grads, think they'll be bored.

Someone in the Software engineering course said 3rd year is like 1st year Games.

Name no names! pew pew pew

My thoughts are; get a degree in whatever (as long as it's relevant) then it's your portfolio that gets you jobs.

Graduated same year as above and would agree with the above, get the degree and the portfolio will get you the jobs

Dboy85

I should of went for the easy option then fook it :pac:

The_B_Man

How did u manage to build up ur portfolio?
Did you have much by the time u graduated?

RedXIV

The_B_Man wrote: »

How did u manage to build up ur portfolio?
Did you have much by the time u graduated?

Me personally? I had squat. After my 3rd year I had pretty much given up on ever getting a game coding job as I couldn't keep up with everyone else. Pure stubbornness and great support from certain lecturers were the only reason I managed to finish the course. Having recently done a training course with 11 other IT graduates, I realised I wasn't as bad as I thought, the guys in my class were just alot better, so am looking at this again

However we had one or two guys in the class who would take every project we had been given and taken the time to polish them off to produce quite a large portfolio.

If you've ANY gaming contributions, stick them in your portfolio (as long as your honest about your involvement). Work on opensource projects, do small flash games in your own time. If you can create a simple flash game that is addictive that a prospective employer will WANT to keep playing, its better than an attempt at a PS3 title that he thinks is a load of crap.

Polish everything you have and don't stop coding.

Genghiz Cohen

RedXIV wrote: »

Polish everything you have and don't stop coding.

They don't even have to be games, tools are very relevant.
I just recently made a tool that takes a character map and tells the computer where to find each char (assuming they are in ASCII order).
It took about 2 hours to get the basics off the ground in C# and 3 days of additions.
Now if only I could get it to install anywhere else...

Tech demos, even if it has been done before.
Multi-Core processing is the way forward, if you were to make something simple, like finding the first 1000 prime numbers and get the full use of all cores on a PC while doing it. That would show you know about multi-core processing.

Portable devices too, if you have an Android/iOS phone, pulling out these little demos in an interview would get huge points. (srsly, huge)
"So what do you do in your free time?"
"This" /Pulls out phone
/hired

As Red says; make it small, make is polished.

RealistSpy

Lad regarding portforlio how do you organise them?

I have been making my own little software and I just have them arranged nicely on my pc. I used different languages - VB.net, c++ and Java. I will be learning c# after my current project.

Genghiz Cohen

Do as the code lobsters do: http://darraghcoy.com/

If you have a Google account (free) they will host a site for you and help you build a simple one.
sites.google.com

RedXIV

Was wondering when Lobsters site was gonna get posted.

Just for clarification, the owner of the above site had offers thrown at him left right and center. You now have the perfect model to build your portfolio on.

The benefits of this show you can do more than just code games, you're willing to branch out, i.e. web technologies

RealistSpy

Thanks guys just what I was looking for.

RealistSpy

My Site

I used the site.google to make my site. Its not fully done but it should be just right soon.

Genghiz Cohen

Get yourself an email in the format of:
firstname.lastname@gmail.com
or
First initial.lastname@gmail.com
Have your CV displayed on your site with link to download a .PDF of it. (There's an extension of MS Word that lets yo save as .pdf)
you also have problem solving in its own category outside of skills.

Remember, do as the Lobster does, have your projects on the front page.

A cheap and cheerful URL is a .tk one, they were free last time I checked and don't look as well as .com/.ie, but better than sites.google.com/herpderpsmerp