Since it’s that time of year again (and me and my boyfriend just found out he’s going to get his tuition totally covered plus some extra! Hooray!) I thought I would talk about college. Specifically, I would answer the question:
Where should I go to school if I want to make video games?
In the US, there are pretty much two schools specifically for game design that are worth the money. Digipen in Seattle, and the Guild Hall in Dallas. If you graduate from one of these schools, you are pretty much guarateed a job. Most of Digipen’s students are hired before they even graduate. (The Portal team? Poached wholesale by Valve from Digipen.) That is, of course… IF you graduate. Both schools have a pretty hardcore schedule and will work you hard, harder than you will probably end up working in the industry. Digipen has many students drop out in the first six months because they just can’t handle it.
What if you don’t live in Dallas or Seattle, though? (Well, move. You’re going to have to move to Dallas, Seattle or Southern California to get a job in the industry anyway, so keep that in mind.) Maybe you have some kind of school near you that offers a game design course, of you’re looking at the Art Institute of Whatever City You Live In. The first thing you want to look at is price. Many game design courses are expensive and you need to know if they’re worth the money beforehand. Ask about how many graduates of the course have been hired, and where. Post on a place like CGChat and see if anyone has heard of the program or attended it and what they thought. These programs can be useful in teaching you new skills, or a total waste of money.
If you’re looking to be an artist, consider getting a traditional fine-arts degree and learning 3-d in your spare time or in continuing education classes. A strong background in fine arts and 2-d work will translate to a stronger portfolio and better 3-d work. One of the major benefits of this approach is you can go to school where ever is close, even start out at a community college, and spend a lot less money in the long run.
Want to be a programmer? Find a college with a decent computer science program and take that. You don’t need to learn game-specific programming, C++ will do. Get your hands on the Unreal Editor or something similar and learn to work with it and modify it in your spare time. If you have solid programming skills, a studio is likely to work with you to get you familiar with the engine they use and any specialized coding required. Everyone has to start somewhere.
If you want to be a game designer? Well, that one’s tricky. There aren’t that many classes out there that teach you how to really design systems. There’s a lot more to design than just having an awesome idea. That idea needs to work properly, it needs to work with other ideas and it needs to have rules governing how it works. There aren’t classes for that kind of thing, it’s something learned as you go. The best advice I’ve heard on this one? Design your own board game. Make a board, invent the rules, and then get your friends to play it and tell you what they think. Get lots of people to play it. Ask them if it’s fun, and specifically what makes it fun. Ask them what problems they had with it. After you get all their feedback, take it into consideration and change the game to make it better. That’s what designers do. They come up with ideas and then design systems to make the ideas work correctly. Schools, sadly, lack good programs that teach these things, so if you want to learn them, you have to teach yourself.
Good luck, and where ever you end up going to school, remember to do your homework!
One place specifically for 3D animation that comes highly recommended by literally every animator in the industry I know is Animation Mentor. The upside: It’s online, and can be accessed basically at your convenience, and the instructors there are some of the best in the world. The downside is that it’ll cost you (worth it, according to everyone who’s taken it), and you need to already have a working knowledge of Maya before coming in.