Game Dev Major at UCT: Worth taking? Or ComSci enough?
Hi,
I know this has been asked on here before, but the last time was a couple years ago so I thought more people have gone through the program now, so I'd thought I'd ask again.
I am just starting at UCT this year, but the courses of the Game Dev Major only kick in at Second Year. I wanted to know if they're worth it from a 'game design' aspect as, I would imagine, the ComSci Major would suffice for most programming aspects of game development and I've already starting fiddling with Unity.
Just a little about me, I find I work better in a structured environment (like classes) than on my own impetus. But I find I get frustrated if I'm not learning anything new or that I could have just taught myself.
I know this has been asked on here before, but the last time was a couple years ago so I thought more people have gone through the program now, so I'd thought I'd ask again.
I am just starting at UCT this year, but the courses of the Game Dev Major only kick in at Second Year. I wanted to know if they're worth it from a 'game design' aspect as, I would imagine, the ComSci Major would suffice for most programming aspects of game development and I've already starting fiddling with Unity.
Just a little about me, I find I work better in a structured environment (like classes) than on my own impetus. But I find I get frustrated if I'm not learning anything new or that I could have just taught myself.
Comments
The course is far more development oriented than "design" oriented. That said, I don't think it should be overlooked.
Firstly, the course will direct your thinking to aspects of developing games you won't find through typical small game projects. For example, the course is Unity-based but you also do a tiny bit of OpenGL and shaders. While that might not be immediately useful, it can give you a good idea about how Unity handles things in the background.
I think in general the course is a great platform to ask questions. There are some pretty smart people running the course with quite a wide amount of experience. They could also probably direct you to people who can answer any questions they can't.
Ultimately, the course is kind of what you make of it. I would say do it, even if it is only with the ulterior motive of abusing all the resources it provides :) Bug all the tutors/ TA's/ lecturers!
PS: I've found that it's pretty useful to be able to say "I have a degree in CS and game development" to clients/business peeps. Easier than saying I have a CS degree and taught myself gamedev (you get far more questions trying to determine how legit you are).
Also, there's a bunch of irony with that particular course, last time I lectured for it a bunch of students who had taken it didn't really want to make games, they'd just signed up because it had a reputation for being really hard and they wanted to be able to say they'd done it on their CVs (both misunderstanding what the course was for AND how people look at CVs when hiring).
How often do you talk about difficulty of making games? I find it mostly it that many beginners are given bad advise on the topic... When they ask how to start making games, the usual answer will be : "just use Unity" !!! Later when they find out that they cannot make games, they start blaming Unity, not realizing how much time they had to spend on teaching themselves how to program before they can even think about touching unity... I myself not a unity user I spent some time familiarizing myself with the platform. At first I taught the way people were talking about unity, was gonna be a walk in the park and after making a 2d shooter, I just realized in terms of difficulty, it was not so different from coco2d-x. The only difference was placing of object, but unity did not do me anything new that cocos2d-x could not do, so I went back to cocos2d-x because its 100% open source o-o...
So from your perspective as a veteran in this field, what will be your advise to someone who has zero knowledge on programming, and someone with programming knowledge but are fearful of things like linear algebra and trigonometry?
As @creative630 said, it is valuable in that it helps you understand modern graphics pipelines, the basic theory behind game engines, physics and AI and has a module on shaders, which are some of the most awesome things ever, and will make you more valuable as a game developer. What it won't teach you is design sensibilities, won't particularly build you a compelling portfolio and at least in the local industry isn't considered that impressive, largely for the reasons ennumerated by @dislekcia.
Do the course, you're studying CS anyway, and unless you want to major in something like maths or statistics, is one of the more stimulating second majors in the CS departments. But be aware that this won't automatically entitle you to a job in the game industry later on. Try to join in on the game jams, get involved in the community and learn new things (not even necessarily related to coding or game design). I'm not a professional game dev, but even at my job at the start up I work at, I've had to put on many hats.
That's the strange thing I've felt about Comp Sci. It is in a weird way almost a fundamentally useless degree unless you combine it with other interests or work with a domain expert. Technology is growing increasingly pervasive in almost all domains, and if you want to be in the driver's seat rather than blindly coding to some arcane specification, you have to really understand the endemic problems in a given domain. I would argue that this would also apply to game design, as game design could be considered an art-form, and through this lens if one just looks at existing games for inspiration, your work won't be anything but derivative.
I advocate stuff like GM and Unity because I think game development is hard enough already. I also do a "tetris test" with people who don't believe me (I'm pretty sure I did it on you ages ago too) - whenever people think making a game is a simple matter, I challenge them to make tetris. It's a known game, it's hardly realtime, it's pretty simple... And it still takes people ages. Then I make tetris in 20 minutes in GM in front of their eyes and they start to get more switched on. I think it depends on what they're trying to do. Most of the time I'd ask more questions to find that out. If I can't, then I'd tell them to download Game Maker and do tutorials until they're bored of them. GM will give you a structure that you can slot game logic on top of without needing to understand how it's coded under the hood, it will allow you to progress from simple commands with easy names to writing simple code and eventually more advanced code, it will also give you an easy way to add art and other assets to the game without that having to be a coding task too.
I've used GM to explain trig to many, many kids: The usual question is "how do I draw this line towards the mouse cursor but only a certain distance?" and that's 100% trig but they don't realise it yet. I'm not really sure where fear of linear algebra comes in, but I'm not sure why it would come up in GM early on - only once you start trying to do complicated effects or motions would you start wanting that sort of thing. So yeah, GM. Unless I get more info. Look, I'm not 100% up to speed with cocos2d, but one of the major reasons people point to things like Unity or GM or Unreal is that they have an integrated pipeline that lets you see what your game is going to look like as you're making it. That can't be overestimated in how much it encourages people to keep trying. If you spend hours and hours on something only to get a black triangle on the screen, that's not very impressive or confidence boosting to most people who are keen and just dabbling. If you spend 15 minutes and have a thing moving around when you press the keys or a neat particle effect happening, that's way more likely to keep someone trying for another 3 hours.
But the biggest issue with someone starting out trying to make games is lack of scope awareness! People ALWAYS try to build a huge game that's like the thing they just played (that cost millions of dollars and had hundreds of people working on it, but they rarely know that) and that's never going to work. You have to help keen people tone down their expectations to things they can succeed at and grow confidence with. You don't teach someone to drive by throwing them in a racing car and screaming track details at them, they'll die! You help people slowly learn to feel comfortable with the accelerator and gears and turning in an open space in the middle of nowhere. Then maybe you take them on a road after a lot of practice. I always tell game dev hopefuls to make their idea 50% smaller each time it doesn't work and they don't complete a project, then when they do eventually complete something, they can make it 10% bigger next time.
I think that's incredibly important, because even if someone wants to learn how to program engines from scratch amazingly well, they still need to know how to make games. Otherwise what good is their engine ever going to be to anyone? ... You don't learn to drive by building a car. Even if you've taken other cars apart first, you still don't know how they drive until you can drive them.
I wanted to reply earlier but was super sick. Thanks for the advice. Some really good points to take to heart.
@dislekcia Yes Game Dev at UCT only kicks in at second year and my current course selection gives me a lot of possibilities of different Maths/ComSci/Physics majors from second year.
I'll make sure that this year I get as much as I can out of the ComSci Department so I know what to expect next year to inform my decision first hand.
And I'll definitely try to participate more in your community events and game jams (amongst other things) in the months to come.
Thanks for all the advice, very useful!