Behind the Guildhall - The Story of the Students

Sam Machkovech writes "Multiple stories about SMU's Guildhall game design school have already shown up on Slashdot, but none like this. My friend and coworker Paul dug into the motivations and stories behind people who dropped their lives to learn the art of game design in an upstart school, and what the story may lack in technical information, it more than makes up for in the students' accounts. Included is a particularly touching story about a student who survived the 2002 Sari Club terrorist attack in Bali. It also touches upon the excessive overtime and dedication that the job requires, which means graduates should be plenty prepared for their future careers."

Comments

Is it worth it?

[Mr.Dippy]

I would love to learn hard core C++ and design 3D interactive worlds but spending 60 to 80 hours a week working is not my idea of a satisfying career. I know it's not the same thing but if you love programming and want to try to make a career out of it set your sites to application work in PHP/PERL/Java/etc/etc. just my 2 cents

Last Frontier... For Now.

[automag]

The thing I find interesting about game programming is that it is the'last frontier' of art created for consumption by a mass audience that still requires a huge learning curve and cost expendature to be successful in.

Think about it- used to be that you needed a bazillion dollars, a ton of talent, and a lot of connections in order to successfully make a movie, or a record. Now? People are doing it in their basements with equipment that costs a few hundred dollars.

The big question is how long will it take for someone to figure out how to make designing a video game 'accessible to the masses' the way Digital Video and computer-based audio recording have done for those industries. I'll bet it won't take as long as you think...

Re:Last Frontier... For Now.

[TheAdventurer]

Actually making a good record has an enormous learning curve. It's just become socially acceptable to be a poor musician and still be viewed as a sucessful artist. Our society has extremely low musical standards at the moment, and anyone who can bang on an instrument is labeled a musician.

Re:Last Frontier... For Now.

[automag]

I make no value judgements on the quality of the work. Being both a musician and a filmmaker I've seen some damn good work come out of basements (including my own). I say that lowering the barriers to admission will let crap through, but it also lowers the barriers for folks with amazing talent and little $$$ or no family connections to succeed as well. Is the learning curve 'enormous?' Well, I'm not arguing that it is 'flat' by any stretch of the imagination, but 'enormous?' No way. Not today. One thing you can count on is 14-year olds will have no taste whatsoever, but unfortunately this is prime real-estate for movie studios and music companies. Would I trade the fact that I have to wade through more shit to find the good stuff for having less great music or film available to me? Not on your life. I'm willing to put the time searching...

Re:Last Frontier... For Now.

[The Ultimate Fartkno]

And it's also pretty telling that I just deleted Doom III after playing it for two days. After the 653,000th time I walked into a room, the lights went off, and forty things I couldn't see beat the crap out of me I finally realised that I was bored out of my skull. The only thing that kept me going as long as it did was the fact that everything in D3 is just so damned (heh) beautiful! I can't wait for games/mods based on the engine, but the actual Doom experience left me disappointed. All that time and money, and... feh.

So what am I playing now?

The Infocom "Hitch-Hiker's Guide..." game. What was the budget on that one?

Sure, I'm doing it while downloading Half-Life 2, but you see my point.

This story is depressing.

[nathan s]

Frankly, I don't understand how people can do this for any amount of money or passion. You don't do good work when you're running constantly on 6 hours of sleep, and I'm surprised that any of these guys have any sort of a family whatsoever.

I think that if these sorts of conditions are typical in the gaming industry, it might explain why games in general have slid into the sequel-after-sequel hole and there's very little new or original stuff coming out. You can't think clearly when your brain is sleep-addled and you are living on beer and Cheetos.

I'd rather them spend three times as long producing games, so long as the games were actually original and entertaining, and not yet another boring sequel with an ending that sets up for YAYABS [yet another yet another boring sequel]. (Or, in the case of that guy Levy, some sort of social campaign inspired by the modern equivalent of strange women in ponds handing out swords.)

Graduates and Jobs?

[Capt_Troy]

I realize this program is new, but I'd be very interested to know how many of these students get gaming jobs after graduation. I tried to break into the industry for a while, and came close a few times, but it's a very hard thing to do (looking back I'm happy with where I am now). If this program (and/or others like it) can prove itself valuable to game companies such they their students are quickly snatched up, it would remove a major hurdle for interested developers.

Re:Wait a minute

[Surt]

Actually, most games are built with swappable software components already. The problem with intense end schedules has to do with building:

a) the swappable component replacements. Often these are very sophisticated pieces of code, that in the particular case of video or sound have to talk to hardware at a very low level to achieve good performance.

b) squeezing in last minute improvements. Since large numbers of games are competing with each other, there are often last minute requirements driven by new market conditions. If another competing game has just come out with feature X, or has just added X in a patch, you may need to add that feature very near the end of production in order to have your game reviewed positively.

There are lots of unfortunate realities in game developement that require large last minute efforts that simply can't be planned for.