2 year game design degree?

Maru

Hello.

I decided recently I'm going to be involved in make amazing video games no matter how much time it takes, be it more than 10 years or the rest of my life. Me and time versus everything, so to speak.

Having no background in computing, game design, or any "hard" technical skill in any kind of way, it seems pretty obvious I need to take at some time to educate myself.

I live in Osaka and visited HAL College of Technology & Design last week.

http://www.hal.ac.jp/lang/english.html

With this school, I could:

-study full time for 4 years and get a 4 year degree for about 6,000,000yen (around 70,000$US) plus living expenses of 4 years, all paid for by student loans, OR

-work full time and study at night school for a 2 year degree for around 2,500,000yen (like 27,500$US?) and paying it off in real time as otherwise live a normal 社会人 life

Now, the second option seems more attractive to me since it gets me some cred faster, more efficiently and less radically changes my living situation. I'm just wondering if a 2 year degree is even worth doing at all? Does it hold the credibility a game company would need to consider me as a candidate? Is it a realistic timeframe to learn skills I could use to begin building a portfolio? Do I need to check out other schools? Leave Japan (gasp)?

Perhaps more importantly, I hear people knocking the validity of even getting a game design degree in the first place. Is this just simply the wrong path to get into the game industry?

Thanks in advance for any advice. Peace!

Fizban140

I don't know how many people here can help you with anything specific about the situation of the gaming industry in Japan but there are plenty of people that can comment on how it is in the US.

I have just looked at it as a potential career and from I have seen game design degrees are not worth anything more than a more general degree, for a game related job. The huge downside to a game related degree is that it doesn't transfer nearly as well to other jobs.

Another thing to consider is that experience or projects you have worked on are worth more than the degree in some cases.

sonictk

Well I'm currently doing an internship at a local game company, and I'm just as new to the workplace as anyone else is but here's my personal view on it:

If you have absolutely no background in computing or anything like that (e.g. you just like playing games and have great ideas for new ones) you probably should start off by just making your own games and giving life to your ideas. It's a lot easier to start programming now than it was when I was interested in this. So much more resources available. =\ Don't waste your time like I did.

You're going to have to learn programming, or at least the basic concepts behind it at the very minimum. Prototype your ideas using Flash, game maker, whatever so at least you can show people your ideas much more efficiently rather than just typing out documents. I can't speak for most people but personally I would respect a game designer/producer a lot more (like my current one! ) if they were able to understand technical issues instead of just asking whether it could be fixed.

Additionally, I kind of get the vibe that your portfolio is a lot more important than whatever degrees you might have. So I'd suggest to actually work on what you can show your potential employers rather than worrying about the credibility of a degree, if you're dedicated enough to be able to work/learn on your own.

Shogun

A degree (especially in something like Game Design) will have limited credibility be it a 2 year or 4 year degree. This is especially true in Japan where you really have to show and prove your worth. Out of curiosity are you a Japanese person or a transplant? I ask because of an article I read about Game Designers on Kotaku (I know kotaku=shitshit lol). It interviewed several lead designers but one in specific was a white guy who wanted to live and work in Japan. His story was especially interesting but the article as a whole on Game Design is applicable here.

The people who get into this position get there because at many points throughout their career they have shown a capacity to do nearly if not every single job involved in making a game. These guys can proficiently do coding, concept art, 3D modeling, or any of the giant myriad of tasks that contribute to a game. Not only can they do all those things, but they have shown an aptitude to lead a team that can be small or large. Also the amount of personal sacrifice is enormous. It could be 15-20 years before you ever see a AAA title. Expect long nights working on shovelware for the next big kid's franchise. Also plan to be unemployed every 18-24 months.

I know Japan is big on lifetime employment and I do not know if their studios work like studios here in North America, but in NA it is extremely common to be let go when a project finishes. Then you add the experience you learned to your resume and you find a new birth. Its a really tough industry especially for jobs like a Designer.

Wassermelone

How often do the people who graduated from this school actually get jobs? Theres a big part of your answer.

robotbebop

I'm going to second the making your own games suggestion, and add a few software options -

XNA - Takes care of all the boiler-plate OS stuff, leaving you with a core framework to write your game engine on. It doesn't explicitly do anything for you outside of that however; which is part of what makes it as great as it is. I'd say this is an intermediate level option.

GameMaker - it's free, has an editor and a scripting language. It can definitely do what it needs to do, as this guy is using it to make a Metroid 2 remake that looks pretty effing slick. I think this is probably as easy as it's going to get.

Torque Game Builder - this is a pretty well rounded package. The scripting language is powerful but not overtly complex, albeit a bit strange. It serves it's purpose well. It costs $100, but is the most documented of their products. There is a sizeable community on their site, and a few of those people are pretty helpful on their forums. You just have to ignore the posts where people expect Torque to be a make-game button. Another downfall is that TGB will be obsoleted in 2011 when Torque 2D is released, which is apparently based entirely around C# somehow.

I would start with GameMaker (although I've never used it myself) and then once you're comfortable with that dive into TGB. At that point if you feel that you would like to learn the more in-depth areas of development then start looking into XNA or even C++ and tackle some DirectX.

There's also UDK, however it is massive and really hard to start with by yourself. Also, the community is... well, judging solely by the forums anyway: dumb.

The sad part is that most of these tools aren't really portable skillsets. When you learn them you should try to absorb the abstract of whatever you're doing, so that you can easily apply those skills to other frameworks.

Dead Computer

The iPhone and iPad is another good place to learn game design in.

If you can design a good game on a platform like that, everything else is cake.

Maru

Thanks all for the replies. Very insightful.

More info on this school: This game design degree program I checked out is mostly learning C and some C++ and also making 5 DS games over the course of 2 years. There's a really high employment rate for graduates of this school. JP game companies, especially Nintendo and Capcom (both companies headquarters are in the metropolitan area) seem to have very close connections with it. I know at least some of the teachers are Capcom employees. Shigeru Miyamoto comes once a year and gives a seminar. IMO though, making connections with the other students heading into the industry and having a nice facility with tons of hi-tech equipment would probably be where I'd be getting the most out of my money.

All that being said, most everyone I talk to in RL seems to agree that Practice > Theory, ie, portfolio > education. That jives better with my experience too. I just need to buckle down, ration out my time, and learn some skills on my own. Which I can do.

The people who get into this position get there because at many points throughout their career they have shown a capacity to do nearly if not every single job involved in making a game. These guys can proficiently do coding, concept art, 3D modeling, or any of the giant myriad of tasks that contribute to a game. Not only can they do all those things, but they have shown an aptitude to lead a team that can be small or large. Also the amount of personal sacrifice is enormous. It could be 15-20 years before you ever see a AAA title. Expect long nights working on shovelware for the next big kid's franchise. Also plan to be unemployed every 18-24 months.

This sounds about right. I was think it would be at least 5-10 years before I got anywhere anyway, but since I'm in it for the long haul, this sounds like EXACTLY the hard-knocks kind of advice what I was looking for. Anything else along these lines I should be aware of?

I'm going to second the making your own games suggestion, and add a few software options -

Prototype your ideas using Flash, game maker, whatever so at least you can show people your ideas much more efficiently rather than just typing out documents.

Thanks for the recommendations, I'll check them out.

Would anyone make a case for or against using RPGMaker? I have a friend who worked several years for IBM and the JP game industry. He said making a couple games with that would be a good way to get started training myself.

Also, any other forums, websites, communities I need to get involved in? I bookmarked maybe 50 sites last week and am going through them one by one deciding if they're useful or not.

Thanks again to everyone who's replied

neville

Gamasutra has information for people interested in the games industry, be it design, production, programming, etc.

There are a number of well reputed schools.
The school I attend, DigiPen, ranked 2nd on the best schools for design (behind USC -- mainly due to our lack of a large "campus").

I would do some research.
In general, making a few "games" with RPGMaker is not going to be enough to impress most hiring managers into interviewing you.

Lewisham

Do a search for DrFrylock's previous posts about working in games. It's no picnic.

I'm working on a PhD at the games research lab at UC Santa Cruz. The thing about the game design degree here is that its really hardcore CS. They're difficult classes. I would say that the straight CS major is likely easier as you have more leeway to pick some easier classes along the way.

I don't think you will learn what you need to know in two years. The degree here focuses on trying to build a portfolio too, and even with the best prep we can give them, students are going out into a fiercely competitive market. Heck, some of them might not even like programming games (I know I don't).

I think you need to think more deeply about whether trying to combine your hobby and your worklife are really going to pay off the way you think. Read those DrFrylock posts.

sonictk

Would anyone make a case for or against using RPGMaker? I have a friend who worked several years for IBM and the JP game industry. He said making a couple games with that would be a good way to get started training myself.

Also, any other forums, websites, communities I need to get involved in? I bookmarked maybe 50 sites last week and am going through them one by one deciding if they're useful or not.

Thanks again to everyone who's replied

If you have absolutely zero experience in coding or anything then at this point picking anything up won't be wrong, it's more important that you learn the concepts behind stuff imho. RPG Maker isn't bad, just that it's severely limiting in what you will be able to express even with making custom battle/menu systems, so you might find it easier to bring your ideas to life using something else.

I'd say start with Game Maker. You should gain a basic understanding of programming (especially with C/C++) through working with it, and it's versatile enough for most 2D prototyping purposes. Also it's the easiest to set up and work with.

Of course this is assuming you're more interested in the technical side of stuff. If you're like me who wants to work more with the artsy people instead of spending my time looking at dump files from crashes then you should probably go down a different route, meaning draw draw draw draw and preferably artschool.

Also don't end up continually reading everything and never doing anything. Just get started, go with one of your ideas and make it happen. Draw it out, think about how you want to code it out and write it down, whatever. Only start going back to your references when you get stuck, or you'll going through documentation forever.

I dunno, I personally find I understand my process a lot better once you get through your first project and realize all the mistakes you made instead of planning it out meticulously. But I guess some people might prefer the "measure twice cut once" approach though.