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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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While I wouldn't be as, shall we say, "harsh" as you, I do agree with your overall sentiment. This doesn't sound like anything that much more difficult/time consuming than anything I faced as a computer engineering undergrad at Penn State. It's college, it's not supposed to be a cakewalk(unless your major is business of course :P)
Monstar L
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.
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.
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. ;)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
bet all you "hacks" in comp. sci. or engineeering wouldn't be able to "hack" medicine, or vetinary science.
Or spelling. Hooked on foniks phuked u up.
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.
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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