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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."
Given the hours this guy has to put into school, is it per chance sponsored by EA?
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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. ;)
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seriously, who thinks this is funny? how is this funny in any way?
Did anybody else read that comment as "seriously, who thinks this is funky? how is this funky in any way?
LOLOMFGBBQ!!!11!1!!eleventy-one!!
(Make my funny tha P-Funny, kthxbye)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Obviously you must aim really low.
Think about the teams of engineers and computer scientists who design and write for example 3DSMax and Director. I hardly think the effort required to write specialized commercial software even compares with the effort required to create something with it. Irregardless of how intuitive it is.
"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.