Slashdot Mirror
Future Game Coders - Online Education or College?
An anonymous reader asks: "My cousin is about to graduate high school and wants to enter the game industry. I told him to get a day job (possibly as QA in a game studio) and get an online degree like DeVry's Game and Simulation Programming degree or The Art Institute of Pittsburgh's Game Art & Design degree. I have a BS and an MS in Computer Science, and I've only found what I learned mildly useful for my game programming hobby. Should he suck it up and get a 4-year degree, or is taking online courses focused on game development the way to go? Has anybody gotten one of these degrees and done well for themselves?"
Unless the university totally sucks, a computer science degree contains most of the important stuff for game development: maths, maths, applied maths, more maths. Did I mention some math? Oh, and some system programming.
In the end, thats all what games are about.
I didn't check by myself, but my girlfriend who goes to CMU told me they have a graduate program for game programming thats fairly popular with EA too I think, so then one can kill 2 birds with one stone: have a fairly decent CS degree, and game specific education, with a potential big name having you in their line of sight as soon as you graduate... Its almost a flawless plan, if it is true.