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Good Morning, Professor Romero
The Man With The Green Hair writes: "According to this story over at The Dallas Morning News, John Romero and Tom Hall both formally of ION Storm, will be teaching a class next semester at The University of Texas at Dallas where they will be instructing computer science majors on the finer points of game programming and design."
Dr Ian Parberry at the University of North Texas (about thirty minutes away from UTD) already has a course teaching fundamentals of game programming. Three programmers team up with an artist, and you learn to make a GAME (as opposed to a graphics demo). Parberry also has a book based on the class here.
:) ), and he has already put the years into refining the syllabus. You'll get a lot from it, including a preview of the game industry's 80-hour work week.
Given the history of Parberry's class (which used to be called the Laboratory for Recreational Computing (LARC)), it's not surprising at all that Mr. Romero would fail to mention it. Back in '94 some of the students met him and came away...very unimpressed. The consensus then was that Carmack must have really written Doom and Romero came along for the ride -- Romero didn't know half the 32-bit asm as the students, and in the '94 gaming environment that was pretty shocking.
For those in the Dallas area who really want to learn games, try Parberry's course. He's an excellent teacher and a real coder (even though I hate his brace style
Kevin Lamonte
LARC class of '94
CSCI 4050 class of '99
Getting John Romero for game design is like getting Bill Gates for OS design - in times gone they did it themselves and produced good work (Bill Gates: anyone remember the Radio Shack Model 100?), now all they produce is crap...
Calling Romero a professor is going too far, even in jest. It's bad enough that every numbskull who can code Visual Basic calls himself an "engineer", and anybody who knows that Cisco makes routers is suddenly an "architect", but it takes a shitload of hard work combined with an incredible intellect to become a professor. Giving a couple of lectures doesn't warrant that sort of honorific.
I go to an art school. Our studio professors are all working artists, and inevitably in every semester, somebody will ask to see a sample of the professor's work. Oftentimes you'll see a very good, very impressive body of work, typically the product of the sort of values and ideas the person is trying to impress upon his or her students.
In my experience, though, there have been a few teachers who have shown work that is thourougly underwhelming or even out-and-out weak. And from that point on, it's impossible to learn from the person, because you just don't respect what they do.
I imagine this will be the same in this programming class for anybody that's played Daikatana.
There are no fundamental, time-honored principles to game design, because it hasn't been around long enough to establish the same sort of rules you find in, say, graphic design. So in a class like this, you'll be entirely dependent on what the teacher has to say. There really won't be an authoritative accompanying text from which you could choose to learn instead of the professor.
All of Slashdot is going to post here that Daikatana sucks, and all of Slashdot is right. If John Romero knew anything about good game design, he would have taken the seemingly unlimited resources afforded him and been able to produce a good game.
I never played Anachronox, although I read that it was very good. Maybe Tom Hall's got some worthwhile things to say. But is there anybody out there that really respects the work that John Romero's done since he left id? The class is obviously the university's way of getting some press (and, in turn, enrollment and tuition) by taking advantage of a celebrity name, regardless of worth.