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.

New article added – How to be a Games Tester

Read it here. Comments and feedback welcome.

Why I think Metacritic shouldn’t be used as a yard stick

The popularity of Metacritic has grown over the last couple of years as a yard stick to measure the quality of one product to another. The premise is fine, after all what better way to judge the quality of a product then average of the scores from all the reviews for it? However, the problem I have is that the sources for the reviews are not consistent from product to product and because of this, Metacritic scores can be heavily skewed depending on which review sources are included.

This is because not every reviewer works on the same relative scale so while one may perceive 5/10 as average, another may think 7/10. Therefore, comparing two products against each on Metacritic scores alone can be grossly unfair if the review sources for each product are different.

I am not completely dismissing Metacritic as it is still a great source for the consumer to get a rough idea of a product’s quality and also provides a list of review sources to read through, but when an industry starts using it as a target (e.g this must get at least 80% Metacritic), then it can easily become more of ‘Who are we going to get to review this’ rather then focusing on increasing the quality or concentrating on the target audience.

Review of my Portfolio

A few weeks ago, Lee Winder asked if he could use my site for review in his current series The Elusive Demo Portfolio to which I agreeed to and here is the result. Happy reading!

I also got hold of a copy of C++ for Game Programmers Second Edition after reading the First Edition and wanting my own personal reference. The first edition was an excellent read and covers a lot of areas not found in standard C++ books. I am hoping the Second Edition adds to this.

GamesEdu Manchester 08

Thanks to Dr. Jon Purdy from the University of Hull MSc course, I was invited to give a short presenation on how I got into the games industry to other lecturers from various Universities, handful of students and representives from other companies. The idea was that it be interesting to hear from someone who has had experienced different qualities of education and the job hunting expereience thereafter. Considering that this was the first time I have ever given a presentation like this, it didn’t go too badly.

I also met up with John Sear from the University of Derby and Kim Blake from Blitz Games who shared similar concerns about generalist games degrees and the sheer number of students taking these courses.

I was particularly impressed by John’s BSc course that he had created to teach students what they needed to know to enter into the games industry as programmers. Some of the project work is comparable to the material that we had to do in our MSc. Especially where they are taught about industry practises such as source control, coding standards, code reviews and project planning towards milestones. The 4 year course also includes a compulsory placement.

Taking to some of the students of the course, I later found out that they only take in ~50 students per year and this number halves as they progress through the course. Currently, there are only 17 students in the final year. The fact that they were still singing prasies about the course despite the huge demends and dropout/failure of the course speaks volumes about the quality of the course and what they are getting out of it.

It makes me wish I had these courses to choose from back when I was an Undergrad.