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Nobody Gets a Tan at Video Game Camp
theodp writes "Kids at NYU's Intensive Video Game Creation are trading open lakes, green mountains and plentiful daylight for air-conditioned classrooms in the city. Those attending the $5,125, five-week camp - all guys aged 15 to 20 - will use the Center for Advanced Digital Application's facilities to learn the techniques behind Doom, Quake and Madden. It's the first summer camp for game builders on the East Coast. Last year, WA-based Digipen held its first video game creation camp in California, and the University of Illinois hosted one for girls."
Perhaps some of the best mod developers should be invited/sponsored by the games companies, that way the mods and games can be greatly enhaced... just think about it, some mods are even better than the original game... complete with your favorite mod (cs, strike force for UT, jailbreak for UT, etc.)
my $2c
Putting a windows cd backwards, plays evil messages, but it gets worse, putting it right, installs windows.
But Dov Jacobson, an instructor at the camp and founder of Big Fun Development Corp., wants to shoot down the misconceptions of itchy-thumbed gamesters who don't realize that building a game is often much less enjoyable than playing it.
Less enjoyable? Yes. But, I find building games to be very satisfying from a technical standpoint. I'm also the type of guy who oogles tightly written code rather than flashy graphics, but that's just me.
As an aside, what kind of advanced techniques can you learn in five weeks? Or for that matter, implement? And what constitutes "advanced"? Somehow, I don't think they're talking John Carmack tweaking code advanced, more like here's opengl use it advanced. Or maybe DirectX, but you'll spend your five weeks learning COM programming.
I could see it now:
Students, today we're going to learn an A* path finding algorithm, finite state machines, and I'll teach you linear algebra so you can understand how to shear, rotate, and translate in 3d. We'll break for lunch, and then we'll implement all that in C. Shall we start?
There are many better alternatives. Theres a lot of hardware, software and books you could buy for 5k. You could probably even go to industry events and make contacts if you were that keen. Hell, a half dozen of them could invest their 5k and get there first failed start-up behind them early.