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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."
No its not afilliated with EA. I believe the one in Southern California is however. The Guildhall is owned and run by SMU and has a panel of "Guildmasters" made up local industry developers in the Dallas area that serve as consultants for curriculum and advisors to the faculty and staff. Also, every faculty member has some sort of industry experience.
Well, to be fair SMU is a respectable institution academically, and 24k/yr is their normal tuition rate (give or take; I'm not a student there but my significant other is). I imagine these folks are getting a good education for their money.
(SMU has a bit of a reputation as being a warehouse for the rich-and-dumb set of Dallas/TX society, and there are a high number of Greek-letter wearing, BMW-or-spanking-new-Mustang driving, 19 year old idiots on campus, but there are a lot of very serious scholars as well.)
Of course, the idea of paying 24k/yr tuition is ridiculous to me, as I racked up almost two hundred hours of credit across two major disciplines and a minor (chemistry, cs, and business) over the course of about six years' worth of (non-contiguous) time at UT Austin (which provides at least a comparable level of education) for less than 30k, and thought the ~2k I was paying for six hour semesters at the end was ungodly expensive. But then again UTCS wouldn't be caught dead offering anything as applied-science as programming or game design. ;)
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