College Course: Games Development!

Daniel L

Hi guys I just got an offer to go and study games development in It Sligo , has anyone got any advice for me starting the course? I have experience in programming and all that I just don't know what to expect.. thanks..:)

Genghiz Cohen

The math might be a bit of a kick in the teeth.
Go to all your lectures! ALL OF YOUR LECTURES! ALL OF THEM! I DON'T CARE WHAT TIME IT IS AND HOW LATE YOU GOT TO BED! GO!

Do take notes, I fobbed this off and regretted it.
Seriously, just sketch down vector and the math involved, how winding orders work. Moving to texture space. Binary -> Decimal -> Hex. That kind of thing.

Save everything you do. If you can Git or SVN do that, if not learn. It is really handy when you spend 3 days coding yourself into a dead-end. Commit often and push/check-in after each viable chunk of functionality.

If this is your first college experience, get involved in lots of societies, you can discover a lot of fun things now that you won't have time to do in 2-3 years.

If the exam is 'Open Book', prepare for the worst. You will need to understand rather than just know.

UML is actually used in real life.

SigmundFreud

I'm a Game design/dev student going into second year. First year was just all about computers for me. No game design/dev at all. I joined a society straight away and that got me designing and creating games for jams and competitions.

DO NOT GET INVOLVED WITH THE SILLY GAMERS WHO ARE THERE TO PLAY GAMES.

Being awesome at playing games generally means your gonna suck at making them. That's what i was told in the very first lecture we had from a lecturer who is in the games industry for the last 15 years.

He asked "Who here plays WoW?". 3/4 of the class put up their hands. He then said "Wow, we're gonna have a small class next year then." And it was true, i think half of the class has either dropped out or failed exams.

You really do need to be pro active in finding like minded people. Once you find them it's great fun. The rewards outway the difficulty of the lectures. I found Design Concepts and Operating Systems the most tedious so far. I'm expecting a lot more of that in the future.

If you like making things, tweaking, dismantling and learning. You'll love the coarse.

DesperateDan

Yeah it's true the guys playing cod all the time are usually the ones who did sh!te unless they are total geniuses already. I would say try and discover what it is you most like about games development early on, because it will be extremely useful for self-chosen papers you need to write or your final year projects. I was a modeller, so during my summers I would endlessly soak up all I could about 3ds max, photoshop, zbrush etc., and when I came back to college lecturers would spend ages describing what normal mapping is and why we use it and none of it was new to me which helps out.

For most of our modelling classes I was telling the lecturer how to do stuff

If you're a programmer then certainly pick up some tutorials / intro books etc. to programming in C# or C++. Most likely the whole course will be very focused on Unity - because it's really the only robust option at the moment for student devs. So learn the Unity pipeline, how to assign scripts, import models, play animations etc..

I would disagree about the point on going to every single class. In my experience for every semester you will have at least one dud class. A class where they teach you power point, or the lecturer reads directly from the notes he puts up online (and is generally sh!te), or a subject that might have an open book exam and is stupidly simple. Look out for these and judge yourself whether you can avoid them to give yourself more time off - might be best to leave it until 2nd year before you do that though!

Finally put as much effort as humanly possible into every % of Continuous Assessment they throw at you. It makes a huge difference and takes off a massive amount of pressure when it comes to exam time. Some lecturers make you work like a b!tch for a few %, others hand it out like sweets just for attending class (these are usually the classes you could totally miss if it weren't for that CA), but try and grab it all!

Good Luck!

Genghiz Cohen

DesperateDan wrote: »

I would disagree about the point on going to every single class. In my experience for every semester you will have at least one dud class. A class where they teach you power point, or the lecturer reads directly from the notes he puts up online (and is generally sh!te), or a subject that might have an open book exam and is stupidly simple.

I'd agree somewhat with the first point and completely disagree with the second. This is based on personal experience so I'm sure OP's experience will be somewhere in the middle.
For dud classes, yeah there are some that can be skipped. But they are all worth a % of your end of year mark.

For the crap lecturers, I had one for Applied Math. He was too smart, he couldn't get down to our level. So people stopped going in and just got the notes online. There were 2 problems with that.
1) The notes were complicated. Without a person to ask they were mostly gibberish.
2) The bastard took them offline before an exam since so many people had stopped turning up to his lectures.

Everyone in the group that decided to stop going failed the year.

BE WARNED!

Daniel L

jesus the maths sounds like a bitch , is it actually that hard? like is it full on maths or do they explain it to you from a programming and game dev point of view like a situation were yu will need it.. instead of ****ing on about the fundamental theorem of calculus?

SigmundFreud

I found the maths pretty challenging as it was not thought in context. It wasn't thought from a game dev point of view. The lecturer i had was really into games and was really cool so when we asked where it could be used we got detailed examples and explanations. You should try and use the math yourself in games to make it stick. Like when we were doing calculus i would try and make java programs that utilize and manipulate everything that i learned that day. The challenge will make it stick.

DesperateDan

Yeah it totally depends on the lecturer as to how difficult it is. You'll need to get comfortable with Matrix multiplication, converting numbers to binary/decimal/hex, writing out physics equations - nothing really truly difficult and I'm someone that's no maths genius.

I had some great maths teachers in college and from 1st year they really tried to cater to all abilities. If you were truly woeful at maths, (like just about had a Junior Cert level) then there should be extra classes in a learning center / grind area if the college is decent enough.

Laim

So for people who are starting this year in game related courses , dont go in expecting to play video games and attend lectures? hopefully I can conquer the maths part

Genghiz Cohen

Laim wrote: »

So for people who are starting this year in game related courses , dont go in expecting to play video games and attend lectures? hopefully I can conquer the maths part

Don't go in expecting to be using level editors or anything.

Don't expect to be designing and creating the art assets or sound either.
Programmers get that stuff delivered to them and they stitch it all together.

SigmundFreud

Genghiz Cohen wrote: »

Don't go in expecting to be using level editors or anything.

Don't expect to be designing and creating the art assets or sound either.
Programmers get that stuff delivered to them and they stitch it all together.

Exactly. That's how they teach it. It's not game dev / design related at all. Your learning the guts of computer science and programming.

RedXIV

I'm gonna echo above, go to classes. Even if you think the class is useless, unless you're actively working on something else, you're far better off in the useless class for an hour where you might pick up SOMETHING of use. Could be another student asking a question which makes everything click and if you're not in the class you'll miss it. And +1 to save and back up everything you've done, you'll never know when you might want it again.

Finally, engage with your lecturers if at all possible. If the class is small enough, work with them. The ONLY reason I passed my course was being dragged through it by a couple of lecturers who constantly bailed me out when I need help and morale.

And don't be afraid to enjoy yourself as well Every time I think about college, I think of the funny stuff that happened outside the classroom. Don't give up your life completely, make sure you work hard and play hard (you'll live without sleep)