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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."
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.
"Besides...do game companies actually hire from these places?"
Who knows about the press release, but they have hard stats on their placement that kill all the other schools. It's over 90% placement at the hardcore game companies. Check out where all their grads have gone to: http://www.guildhall.smu.edu/placement/index.htm
Blizzard, NCsoft, EA, Bethesda, Raven, Factor 5, Ensemble, Gearbox... It's safe to say that the school is legit.