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A Day In The Life At The GuildHall
Gamasutra has a great feature up, looking at a day in the life of Tony Basch. Tony is one of the folks currently attending The GuildHall, a directed course in game development at Southern Methodist University. Several big-name talents are associated with the place, and his writeup is an interesting look into one of these very new programs. From the article: "Kyle and I remain in the classroom to work on our individual class assignments. While programmers have their Minesweeper clone, the level designers (or LDs as everyone calls them) have 90 textures to do in seven days on top of their normal reading assignments, daily quizzes, and work from other classes. Personally, I wouldn't be able to survive such an assignment, so I give my respect."
Sorry, it's early and I haven't had my caffeine yet.
Given the hours this guy has to put into school, is it per chance sponsored by EA?
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And guilds are obviously in every 3d mumtiplayer game? Marvelous. Cheers, dudes!
... just how much Gamasutra gets paid for these little advertisements: "This program is really, really hard, but I'm glad I convinced my parents to pay the $24k/year tuition! You should get your parents to send you too!"
for great justice, this sig has been moved
How's the new order of things go? If you can't hack engineering, go comp sci. If you can't hack comp sci, go LD.
Wusses...
I had three different classes in game development at MSU through their Digital Media Art & Technology program, and they were definitely the most difficult classes I had in school. Many a late night was spent creating models in 3DS Max and programming Director 8. I still dabble in game development, but those guys are definitely a different breed. I'd be interested in seeing the drop-out rate of these schools.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
We used to hang out all the time before he went in. Now I never even see him or hardly hear from him. It is as rough as it sounds.
...port the thing over to the PS3 platform in time for the system launch.
as a teenager.
And my tool was DPaint IV, not some fancy Photoshop.
Per-pixel 'texture' editing, bitch. Dozens an hour. Sure, they were smaller (16x16 pixels) but I imagine they take the same amount of time in the end given the tool superiority and colour range available today. Why? because I wanted to, and then I'd stick them in the game I'd be writing at the same time. I'd only have a few hours to do it in. Level design would be done in a primitive editor, or by hand entering data.
In the end it seems like a pretty standard course in terms of work that has to be done. THey're paying $24k a year to learn 'creativity' though, and that's something that best comes naturally from someone who wants to do it. Artistic skill, likewise, can only be further developed if there's some to start off with.
"How's the new order of things go? If you can't hack engineering, go comp sci. If you can't hack comp sci, go LD."
Elitists snob. It's not about being unable to "hack" engineering, or computer science. It's about being able to hack LD, and the work that it requires. I bet all you "hacks" in comp. sci. or engineeering wouldn't be able to "hack" medicine, or vetinary science.
I just use all the bitmap files that came with Windows 95. Ahh, yes, nothing like a level made up of blue marble and fall leaves.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Dude. Hypocrite. How do YOU find time for a girlfriend spending all of your time on Slashdot being a total troll. You should get a life, be kicked in the balls, and then go to jail.
GOOD DAY, SIR.
irregardless Pronunciation (r-gärdls)
adv. Nonstandard
Regardless.
[Probably blend of irrespective and regardless.]
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While programmers have their Minesweeper clone, the level designers (or LDs as everyone calls them) have 90 textures to do in seven days on top of their normal reading assignments, daily quizzes, and work from other classes. Personally, I wouldn't be able to survive such an assignment, so I give my respect.
It's nice to see a school program that gives a taste of what it's really like to work in the video game industry. I had the opposite problem when I working at Atari as a lead QA tester: working 80 hours a week and taking two or three programming classes to get out of the industry. Needless to say, my boss didn't think I was a "team player" since I had an exit strategy for regaining my personal life and make more money.
Did you have any idea, how much the PS3 sucks? It's going to be so bad that it won't have any PS2 ports. It will all be USB. Consequenty, the IBM Cell processor will definitely take a *stab* at X-Box compatibility but will never stand up to the capabilities that it should have tried in its first release...I'd be careful if I were you on this one as we all know how well Sony works at messing things up. Sony, since the 80's, has made very horrendous vacuum tubes and does not know what it should make 15 years later. Panasonic knows. Panasonic made a great Nintendo X-Cube processor, and look where that landed them. In the deep end. Just like Scrooge McDuck. In the deep end of the pool of money that is. So if I were you, I would beware of these Japanese companies because some are good and some are not.
In conclusion, I would be extremely wary of spending the time to think up such a preposterous idea because we all know that the PS3 is going to flop because of the aforementioned cases that I have already stated. If you knew *anything* about electrical engineering, you would agree. I'm glad that you agree then.
So take a good look into the closet because you came outside of it a long time ago. Good day, sir. I wish you many blessings from the Japanese chip fairies.
A.C.
Besides...do game companies actually hire from these places? Anybody can make a game...but it takes a good programmer to develop one.
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