User 144492
Banned
Before posting in the topic, I would appreciate it if you first read the content of the opening post. This is not a topic made by some angry kid looking for some comeuppance; its not a blog post that hopes to achieve the sympathy of strangers on the internet. Ive come to a pretty sad conclusion over a number of years now and its lead me to this topic where Id like to share my thoughts. For anyone looking to study games design, please research your course and your place of study. Sadly there are educational institutions i.e. colleges and Universities around the UK that run Game Design, courses simply to get funding and arses on seats, but for someone who dreamt of designing games, you can hit the ground hard with a bang and its a very saddening revelation when it happens. So this is just my experience, obviously there are plenty of people who have had some great tutors and courses who have studied hard and gone onto great things. This is just my personal experience and the path I choose to try and get into the industry. Baring that in mind, Id still like to hear from other members on GAF to discuss other peoples experiences so we can share the lessons learnt and opportunities taken. I am going to be vague with some details as Id still like to keep some anonymity, though, Id like to clarify that this thread is not a hate topic against a particular person or institution.
Since getting my first PlayStation in Christmas 1996, all Ive wanted to do is design games. Born in 90, I studied information technology at college for four years to the higher national diploma level before applying to University in May of 2010. At the time that I was compiling and revising my personal statement, my dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer. They didnt know how serious it was but after a long fight lasting over a year, he thankfully survived and has seen me through my journey. Part of the reason I choose the University I did is because of the diagnosis, it was a course run in a new facility in my home town and my next closest offer would have been too far. If I had chosen to study Game Design at the University of Stafford, I would have been too far away to come home and say goodbye should the worst case scenario have arisen.
I chose my University based on multiple factors. Partly because it was being run in a newly built facility, it seemed to be quite professional and there were many benefits. However Id like to emphasise that this course was also new and I was one of the second waves of students to be admitted. The University in question had further swayed me with art work done from two particular students, one of whom works for Naughty Dog and the other for Ninja Theory and worked on Uncharted 2 and Enslaved respectively. However the majority of students that graduated went on to work for Travellers Tales, the same company that all of the games tutors had previously worked for.
I would like to point out that my degree was a combined honours which means that I studied game design as well as business studies and completed an elective project to form a Bachelors Degree with honours. It was supposed to teach us how to become entrepreneurs and start our own business venture in the games industry, as well as being able to directly apply for a role within a development house. From my knowledge, only one of the graduates of the course went on to work as a game designer from other roles within SCEE. The course was pawned off onto the college from which the University rented part of the facility and was discontinued to be revised in summer 2015 due to lack of applicants.
So summer passed quickly enough and day one rolled around. We were using basic machines with 2nd generation Intel i3 processors, 4GB of RAM and no graphics card. All systems used Cloud storage and ran on Windows 7. We waited an hour after the class was set to begin when a man nobody recognised walked into the room. All seven, yes, seven of us went quiet as he sat down in the tutors chair in front of the interactive white board, face palmed and said, and I quote, Im so sorry guys, there has been a tremendous fuck up. Basically we were a sister facility to head campus, it wasnt the sister facilities function to sort out the employment contracts of the lecturers and staff, but someone, somewhere thought differently and as such our tutor left to Australia over the summer to work elsewhere. We waited six weeks for him to return and in the mean time we designed a level for a 2D platforming game on square paper so we could understand the fundamental building blocks of level design. In hindsight, this should have been the first warning sign for me dont get me started on our business modules that were being taught by third year bachelor students from head campus, or guest lecturers as they liked to refer to them.
When our tutor came back, he outlined the first year of the course. On one hand we studied Java and on the other we were set some basic game design challenges. On the Java front we only ever scratched the surface, the most complicated thing we did was write a section of code that would operate an elevator on a basic level and relay some feedback in text form, kind of like your hello world scenario. We never did any games programming, nor did we really learn how programming played a part within the design process. Our main tasks in the design side were things like designing a game based on a fairy tale, designing a game that was non-conflict, discussing what conflict was etc. Designing a one button game was an interesting one.
The point Im trying to make is that our first year, looking back, felt like childs play. I didnt do anything with Java that I hadnt already done in a more detailed manner with Visual Basic at college and as for the designing games, I look back at my old design documents from year one and they feel like a child wrote them, that is how simplistic they are. I even wonder how I got a mark of 64/100 for one task where the submission was 12 pages long and was mostly annotated images. The big thing we learnt in our first year if anything was the pitch document and what needed to go in it.
We complained a lot over the summer, there were continuing talks with the University as we basically threatened to walk if things didnt improve. Thankfully they did and the second year of the course came as a breath of fresh air at the time but again, years down the line with hindsight, I was just wowed by new software, the course wasnt actually improving. The business modules still hadnt taught us very much and our tutor who was amazing in the second year taught us two years-worth of content in a single year and he was so good at his job that they took him from the sister campus and moved him to head campus and replaced him with a guest lecturer for our third year who was a manager for hotels in the lake district
In terms of second year course content, we were finally designing something! Eureka! We were using Unreal Engine 3 and following a set of tutorials that would teach us how to build a level. We did this over the course of six months whilst designing our own reference bible, in regards to how to use the software and at the end of the year we had to design a level of our own that we were evaluated on. In the design side we broke down what a game design document is, what needs to go into it and we designed a game over months with all this content included.
I thought year 3 was going to be the best of all but sadly was one of the worst. Once again our tutor hadnt been given a contact of employment and was absent, but this time only for two weeks. This time we had to design a franchise and that would form our dissertation. We also had an elective module called an honours project which added value to your degree. This is something we choose for ourselves and I decided to study survival horror games, explaining their design, decline and rise back to popularity. It seemed to be going great, until I got my final grade. I was projected a 2:1 with honours and I scraped a pass. I got a 2:2 with honours but only barely, to the point that I think they gave me the pass to keep the banner outside that said 100% pass rate.
As it turned out the business guess lecturer in our third year had no idea what our assignments were and just kind of winged it. The respectable mid 60s I had earned in my games units had been dramatically dropped by the business units where I received 41/100 and 44/100 respectively. When discussing this with the University, they gave me two options, accept my degree or intercalate which meant another year of study, my previous marks wiped clean but on the other hand I would pay £9000 for a single year compared to the £3280.00 per year I had paid up until then. As Im sure you can imagine, my only reasonable option was to accept my degree. Realistically I wanted to be able to pay off my student loan in my life time so I decided to regretfully accept my grade.
Looking back its fair to argue that I should have left sooner but given the improvement we saw in the second year, it truly felt like the course was improving. By the time the third year rolled around, it would have been a massive waste to walk away. But its not just the horrendous experience I had at University that has pissed me off so much since leaving, its the fact that I feel unemployable.
Youd probably ask why I say that and I can give you a fair explanation. After leaving University I applied at SCEE as a tester in the Liverpool facility as well as in a testing position within south Yorkshire. I was notified that I was unsuccessful for both within a day of applying. I was working with a local college in my third year where I managed (after months of planning) to have an established designer come into college and give a lecture on the games industry and how to get into the industry. It was the small studio not too far away responsible for Oddworld New n Tasty. Whilst talking to their head designer, he talked me through my course and asked what I had actually learned and I struggled to answer his question. The argument he made was that I hadnt even made something as simplistic as space invaders to understand properly how to design a game on the most basic level and that could be done in a small amount of code with very basic art assets.
The college I worked for was looking at running a game design course and as well as being a guest lecturer, this person also advised on content to include for the course that would help students apply for University and help them get into the industry. Advanced maths I never studied. Object orientated programming, I lightly touched upon but still never really learnt about or understood. Basic 3D modelling, something easily available to do for free in Blender which again, I never touched upon. It was after speaking with this person that I really began to question my course.
Then I got an interview for a game studio in Manchester. They were a small company that made mobile experiences and their first title was co-designed by a former student (but not of my year) of my course who had since moved on. Excited I took a train to Manchester and met the small team who were looking for a designer to help develop their next mobile game looking to be the next Angry Birds. The interview went really well until he started asking questions which again, I simply could not answer. The man who had been programming games since the ZX Spectrum and Amiga talked with me about my course and what I had learned and literally said It sounds like you didnt learn anything you couldnt have read on the internet. and that just broke me inside. I went out with my head high happy at the experience but got home and broke down. That company went on to product a prototype for a game that was essentially connect four before closing in late 2013. We were talking about conversion funnels, the tools and design methods (technically speaking, not entirely design focused) that I would need to outline for the developers to create the game I would design.
Its only now that I come to realise the truth of the situation which is that I didnt learn anything that couldnt have been taught through internet tutorials. The UDK tutorial videos were all available from the official Epic Games channel on YouTube and werent specifically tailored for University, but anyone who wanted a basic understanding of the engine and how it worked through Kismet, Matinee and Unreal Script. We never studied any kind of programming that helped me understand how it helps make a game. I cant program and we never even touched upon Unreal Script and my course tutor was a programmer himself. I had no idea how to create art assets, what went into creating them. I had no idea about the process from start to beginning. I feel unemployable because as much as I feel that I am great and creative designer, Ill never realise those artistic visions because people who have spent hours on YouTube with Unity, UDK, Blender and PhotoShop following tutorials know more than I do about game design and I paid nearly £36,000 all in for a degree that didnt even teach me the extent of these tutorials. Hell when I graduated in 2013 Unreal Engine 4 was on the horizon so the tools I learnt to use were all but obsolete. I don't even know the first thing about opening my own development studio because nobody from the games or business side of my course had any experience with the business side of games and we mainly studied entrepreneurial skills and case studies of failing businesses.
I dont blame my tutor because I feel as though he too was a victim of the institution and he didn't design the curriculum or grading system. If I had to blame anyone, I think it would be the business minded folk within the University. It became apparent as time went on and looking back that we were just a quick buck to them, a way to pass some young adults on an easy A and make some money, because ultimately, Universities still have to make money to fund and develop further research. I understand this. But as a casualty of the system I and many others have been destined to a life of retail. My degree never helped me get a job in my life because the maximum qualifications required were a GCSE or Key Skills certificate in Math and English. I got the jobs I have because I was competent enough to run a sale through a till. Thats it. Its a truly harrowing and depressing revelation but as I sit here now determined to go again, looking at Blender, learning about UDK 4, Unity and Game Maker, I feel there is an issue that does need to be discussed.
If youre looking to study games design, please take my advice and research everything. The University, their graduates, paths to progression, the curriculum etc. You need to scrunatise every detail and be sceptical of any pitch youre given to get you to attend. The sad truth, as far as I can say for the UK and the educational facilities that I know of and experienced is that game design these days is being run by colleges and Universities as a way to make money by offering a qualification that people who the desire to make games want but what youre really getting is all sub-standard, outsourced and low quality. Just another head to make up numbers.
It's at this point I want to say thanks to anyone who posts and takes this thread seriously, thank you to anyone who read this lengthy OP and hope that someone somewhere finds some useful information that helps them in the future. I would like to hear from other people on GAF who have studied at University and hear about their experiences. Whether they're positive or negative, I'd love to know how people learn in places like the US, Canada or Europe.
Since getting my first PlayStation in Christmas 1996, all Ive wanted to do is design games. Born in 90, I studied information technology at college for four years to the higher national diploma level before applying to University in May of 2010. At the time that I was compiling and revising my personal statement, my dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer. They didnt know how serious it was but after a long fight lasting over a year, he thankfully survived and has seen me through my journey. Part of the reason I choose the University I did is because of the diagnosis, it was a course run in a new facility in my home town and my next closest offer would have been too far. If I had chosen to study Game Design at the University of Stafford, I would have been too far away to come home and say goodbye should the worst case scenario have arisen.
I chose my University based on multiple factors. Partly because it was being run in a newly built facility, it seemed to be quite professional and there were many benefits. However Id like to emphasise that this course was also new and I was one of the second waves of students to be admitted. The University in question had further swayed me with art work done from two particular students, one of whom works for Naughty Dog and the other for Ninja Theory and worked on Uncharted 2 and Enslaved respectively. However the majority of students that graduated went on to work for Travellers Tales, the same company that all of the games tutors had previously worked for.
I would like to point out that my degree was a combined honours which means that I studied game design as well as business studies and completed an elective project to form a Bachelors Degree with honours. It was supposed to teach us how to become entrepreneurs and start our own business venture in the games industry, as well as being able to directly apply for a role within a development house. From my knowledge, only one of the graduates of the course went on to work as a game designer from other roles within SCEE. The course was pawned off onto the college from which the University rented part of the facility and was discontinued to be revised in summer 2015 due to lack of applicants.
So summer passed quickly enough and day one rolled around. We were using basic machines with 2nd generation Intel i3 processors, 4GB of RAM and no graphics card. All systems used Cloud storage and ran on Windows 7. We waited an hour after the class was set to begin when a man nobody recognised walked into the room. All seven, yes, seven of us went quiet as he sat down in the tutors chair in front of the interactive white board, face palmed and said, and I quote, Im so sorry guys, there has been a tremendous fuck up. Basically we were a sister facility to head campus, it wasnt the sister facilities function to sort out the employment contracts of the lecturers and staff, but someone, somewhere thought differently and as such our tutor left to Australia over the summer to work elsewhere. We waited six weeks for him to return and in the mean time we designed a level for a 2D platforming game on square paper so we could understand the fundamental building blocks of level design. In hindsight, this should have been the first warning sign for me dont get me started on our business modules that were being taught by third year bachelor students from head campus, or guest lecturers as they liked to refer to them.
When our tutor came back, he outlined the first year of the course. On one hand we studied Java and on the other we were set some basic game design challenges. On the Java front we only ever scratched the surface, the most complicated thing we did was write a section of code that would operate an elevator on a basic level and relay some feedback in text form, kind of like your hello world scenario. We never did any games programming, nor did we really learn how programming played a part within the design process. Our main tasks in the design side were things like designing a game based on a fairy tale, designing a game that was non-conflict, discussing what conflict was etc. Designing a one button game was an interesting one.
The point Im trying to make is that our first year, looking back, felt like childs play. I didnt do anything with Java that I hadnt already done in a more detailed manner with Visual Basic at college and as for the designing games, I look back at my old design documents from year one and they feel like a child wrote them, that is how simplistic they are. I even wonder how I got a mark of 64/100 for one task where the submission was 12 pages long and was mostly annotated images. The big thing we learnt in our first year if anything was the pitch document and what needed to go in it.
We complained a lot over the summer, there were continuing talks with the University as we basically threatened to walk if things didnt improve. Thankfully they did and the second year of the course came as a breath of fresh air at the time but again, years down the line with hindsight, I was just wowed by new software, the course wasnt actually improving. The business modules still hadnt taught us very much and our tutor who was amazing in the second year taught us two years-worth of content in a single year and he was so good at his job that they took him from the sister campus and moved him to head campus and replaced him with a guest lecturer for our third year who was a manager for hotels in the lake district
In terms of second year course content, we were finally designing something! Eureka! We were using Unreal Engine 3 and following a set of tutorials that would teach us how to build a level. We did this over the course of six months whilst designing our own reference bible, in regards to how to use the software and at the end of the year we had to design a level of our own that we were evaluated on. In the design side we broke down what a game design document is, what needs to go into it and we designed a game over months with all this content included.
I thought year 3 was going to be the best of all but sadly was one of the worst. Once again our tutor hadnt been given a contact of employment and was absent, but this time only for two weeks. This time we had to design a franchise and that would form our dissertation. We also had an elective module called an honours project which added value to your degree. This is something we choose for ourselves and I decided to study survival horror games, explaining their design, decline and rise back to popularity. It seemed to be going great, until I got my final grade. I was projected a 2:1 with honours and I scraped a pass. I got a 2:2 with honours but only barely, to the point that I think they gave me the pass to keep the banner outside that said 100% pass rate.
As it turned out the business guess lecturer in our third year had no idea what our assignments were and just kind of winged it. The respectable mid 60s I had earned in my games units had been dramatically dropped by the business units where I received 41/100 and 44/100 respectively. When discussing this with the University, they gave me two options, accept my degree or intercalate which meant another year of study, my previous marks wiped clean but on the other hand I would pay £9000 for a single year compared to the £3280.00 per year I had paid up until then. As Im sure you can imagine, my only reasonable option was to accept my degree. Realistically I wanted to be able to pay off my student loan in my life time so I decided to regretfully accept my grade.
Looking back its fair to argue that I should have left sooner but given the improvement we saw in the second year, it truly felt like the course was improving. By the time the third year rolled around, it would have been a massive waste to walk away. But its not just the horrendous experience I had at University that has pissed me off so much since leaving, its the fact that I feel unemployable.
Youd probably ask why I say that and I can give you a fair explanation. After leaving University I applied at SCEE as a tester in the Liverpool facility as well as in a testing position within south Yorkshire. I was notified that I was unsuccessful for both within a day of applying. I was working with a local college in my third year where I managed (after months of planning) to have an established designer come into college and give a lecture on the games industry and how to get into the industry. It was the small studio not too far away responsible for Oddworld New n Tasty. Whilst talking to their head designer, he talked me through my course and asked what I had actually learned and I struggled to answer his question. The argument he made was that I hadnt even made something as simplistic as space invaders to understand properly how to design a game on the most basic level and that could be done in a small amount of code with very basic art assets.
The college I worked for was looking at running a game design course and as well as being a guest lecturer, this person also advised on content to include for the course that would help students apply for University and help them get into the industry. Advanced maths I never studied. Object orientated programming, I lightly touched upon but still never really learnt about or understood. Basic 3D modelling, something easily available to do for free in Blender which again, I never touched upon. It was after speaking with this person that I really began to question my course.
Then I got an interview for a game studio in Manchester. They were a small company that made mobile experiences and their first title was co-designed by a former student (but not of my year) of my course who had since moved on. Excited I took a train to Manchester and met the small team who were looking for a designer to help develop their next mobile game looking to be the next Angry Birds. The interview went really well until he started asking questions which again, I simply could not answer. The man who had been programming games since the ZX Spectrum and Amiga talked with me about my course and what I had learned and literally said It sounds like you didnt learn anything you couldnt have read on the internet. and that just broke me inside. I went out with my head high happy at the experience but got home and broke down. That company went on to product a prototype for a game that was essentially connect four before closing in late 2013. We were talking about conversion funnels, the tools and design methods (technically speaking, not entirely design focused) that I would need to outline for the developers to create the game I would design.
Its only now that I come to realise the truth of the situation which is that I didnt learn anything that couldnt have been taught through internet tutorials. The UDK tutorial videos were all available from the official Epic Games channel on YouTube and werent specifically tailored for University, but anyone who wanted a basic understanding of the engine and how it worked through Kismet, Matinee and Unreal Script. We never studied any kind of programming that helped me understand how it helps make a game. I cant program and we never even touched upon Unreal Script and my course tutor was a programmer himself. I had no idea how to create art assets, what went into creating them. I had no idea about the process from start to beginning. I feel unemployable because as much as I feel that I am great and creative designer, Ill never realise those artistic visions because people who have spent hours on YouTube with Unity, UDK, Blender and PhotoShop following tutorials know more than I do about game design and I paid nearly £36,000 all in for a degree that didnt even teach me the extent of these tutorials. Hell when I graduated in 2013 Unreal Engine 4 was on the horizon so the tools I learnt to use were all but obsolete. I don't even know the first thing about opening my own development studio because nobody from the games or business side of my course had any experience with the business side of games and we mainly studied entrepreneurial skills and case studies of failing businesses.
I dont blame my tutor because I feel as though he too was a victim of the institution and he didn't design the curriculum or grading system. If I had to blame anyone, I think it would be the business minded folk within the University. It became apparent as time went on and looking back that we were just a quick buck to them, a way to pass some young adults on an easy A and make some money, because ultimately, Universities still have to make money to fund and develop further research. I understand this. But as a casualty of the system I and many others have been destined to a life of retail. My degree never helped me get a job in my life because the maximum qualifications required were a GCSE or Key Skills certificate in Math and English. I got the jobs I have because I was competent enough to run a sale through a till. Thats it. Its a truly harrowing and depressing revelation but as I sit here now determined to go again, looking at Blender, learning about UDK 4, Unity and Game Maker, I feel there is an issue that does need to be discussed.
If youre looking to study games design, please take my advice and research everything. The University, their graduates, paths to progression, the curriculum etc. You need to scrunatise every detail and be sceptical of any pitch youre given to get you to attend. The sad truth, as far as I can say for the UK and the educational facilities that I know of and experienced is that game design these days is being run by colleges and Universities as a way to make money by offering a qualification that people who the desire to make games want but what youre really getting is all sub-standard, outsourced and low quality. Just another head to make up numbers.
It's at this point I want to say thanks to anyone who posts and takes this thread seriously, thank you to anyone who read this lengthy OP and hope that someone somewhere finds some useful information that helps them in the future. I would like to hear from other people on GAF who have studied at University and hear about their experiences. Whether they're positive or negative, I'd love to know how people learn in places like the US, Canada or Europe.
