Games Design Courses – Are they worth it?

Disclaimer: Everything here is of my own opinion and do not necessarily represent any other party’s views.

Note: When I refer to game developers, this means I am referring to everyone involved in the development of the game such as programmers, artists, producers, designers, etc.

There has been increasingly more enquires about becoming a games developer in forums related to games careers such as the ones on IGDA and GameCareerGuide. As much as I am happy that more and more people are interested in entering the games industry, the majority of these are asking on how they become a games designer and which games design course should they choose because they naturally see it as the best way to get into the industry. After all, if you want to be a plumber, you do a plumbing course. So if you want to be games designer, you do a games design course, right?

If only it was that simple.

I made this!

Finally, I actually get to say this after waiting for it to be publicly announced: Here is a video on Harry Potter – The Half Blood Prince Potions game which I was primary working on during development of the game, enjoy!

New article added – How to be a Games Tester

Read it here. Comments and feedback welcome.

Design Patterns

I came by a link to SourceMaking on GameDev the other day detailing Design Patterns, AntiPatterns and articles on refractoring which is incredibly useful.

Finally! Some home programming

I actually managed to find some time and motivation to do some programming at home. Not much mind you, but enough to make some progress . Cleaned up my Assert system code, added Halt functionality to aid debugging and wrote a small SDL_Surface wrapper for RAII.

After ditching some of my old programming ‘habits’/rules, I am finding it much easier to pick up and get stuck in again. Writing Doxygen comments in all my classes was a complete motivation and time killerand was one of the rules I ditched in favour of self documenting code.

Saying that, I did come across Test Driven Development (TDD) on GameDev which led me to this set of articles. Considering I am already writing some tests already for some of my classes such as my Memory Manager, adding a little extra framework wouldn’t be too much to ask right?