/digipen/ - DigiPenitentiary

Game Designers should be prototyping outside of the game engine anyways. A games design needs to be at least somewhat fluid, and the RTIS's will need to have a better idea of what to prioritize before they get started on physics, etc. The game should be prototyped and playtested extensively before you even start to worry about putting it in a custom engine.

The school currently does a horrible job teaching group dynamics. The teachers still emphasize "super-devs" rather than super-teams. Teams full of "super-devs" that all get along and all have a similar vision still rarely perform to their potential.

>>2186

All engines equal, I'd agree with you, but when you're working on a student game with a limited timeframe, you need to be working and playtesting in YOUR engine as soon as you possibly can.

Speaking from experience(I'm a BAGD), I made a good amount of prototypes in Zero and Unity as soon as I could, but they turned out nothing like our final result because we couldn't implement it in-engine until 6 weeks in or so and it just didn't work as well as it had in prototypes. (I did help out as much as I could programming-wise, too - I took the BSGD CS classes instead)

>>2185

I said this same thing in 2011. You're expected to turn in pro quality ish on software you've never heard of.

Learn Adobe AI for make sweet visuals and InDesign for booklets.

My most favorite moment at DigiPen, and one of the many that caused me to drop out at the end of the semester, was when I was working on my sophomore game project with an extremely talented artist. The artist was producing art for the game I was working on, doing character animations. I was telling them about how I programmed the animation system to be extremely flexible, allowing frames of animation to be of varying length (time-wise). The artist told me that it would be better if instead of specifying the time in seconds that each frame of animation took, it would be preferable to them if the system instead specified the number of "frames" it took. When I asked what that meant, the artist replied, "Well, I mean, we do our animations at 24 frames per second… … … … oh, but video games are, like, sixty frames per second… … … right?"

As far as I can tell, BFAs are never taught how to make art for video games at all, at least as of halfway through sophomore year. And as a programmer, I have no fucking clue what the best way to put the art in the game is, either, because nobody taught me either.

>>2189

What you described is a fundamental. Digipen doesn't teach that. That's why 2011 GAT classes taught the history of games and not the fundamentals of making games.

We should know how to use at least InDesign and Illustrator. Why the FUCK they taught Flash is beyond me, NO ONE SERIOUSLY USES FLASH!

Art students should be learning how to do Art for games, not for Disney movies… Go to an actual artschool for that shit.

>>2193

They don't really teach Flash, they teach ActionScript 3.0. It's a good framework for understanding how a game engine works for the BAGD's that don't take CS170 & 230, and teaches a C++ based scripting language in the process. It's not ideal, but Ellinger has said several times that if anybody can come up with a suitable alternative which accomplishes the same goals, they would be willing to listen.

>Rtises go into Gam200 with only a sorry C engine with alpha engines bullshit, and are expected to have worked on it over the summer

The only time that's expected, same goes for 300 (More so if you're a 200 team that Rachel + Ben enjoyed seeing), when your trying to aim for an award. You can honestly make a game and engine within the month to pass the course if milestone reports aren't hefty negatives. While your game will be shit and not 'innovative', it's still a passing grade.

I do wish that we had a course on explaining how to build a simple game engine, but when could it be offered? 2nd semester of your programming learning? During GAM200 in your 3rd semester? What would the class be doing after the first half? It'd be a great elective if it teaches you a decent engine of how to implement basic things of everything. Though it'd be a pointless course after the 3rd semester..

>>2199

What about using 230 to do that? And making that a useful fucking course?

It's all just because DigiPen is obsessed with getting students to make highly-competitive projects every year. You really shouldn't do "major" (as in, GAM-level) projects until your junior year, after you've learned a fuckton of shit (especially when it comes to programmers learning how to make a game engine). But instead of fucking _teaching_, DigiPen gets you to teach yourself how to make game engines and shit while you're struggling to get your GAM project to a functional state.

>>2201

But the course is in C so I'm conflicted. The course is alright, it's just extremely slow paced and everything that you wanted to learn you went ahead to learn it on your own.

But yeah I can see 230 being more of a basic engine architecture class, but it'll never happen since Tony has been teaching that class like that for the past uhh.. 10 years I believe?

>>2189

BFA graduate here. Can confirm. I taught myself about exporting 2d and 3d assets and animations, and was somewhat sought after on teams because of that alone. The amount of "how do I do <very simple photoshop/autodesk maya action>" I heard is staggering. I honestly did more teaching than the fucking teachers, sometimes.

>>2218

BFA's like you are a godsend.

I had a BSGD on my team who wrote our asset importer, and our BFA refused to learn it, flat out saying that if he couldn't understand what to do with it without reading instructions he wouldn't bother, and then insisted that the Bsgd import all of his assets. Guess who got fired?

>>2224

I'm just gonna join this little feel good circle-jerk we're having, and say that I fuckin appreciated the programmers who write good importing code and shit too. I don't understand it and I'm sure it's difficult, but it sure is nice when programmers put in that extra time to make an artist's job more about doing art and less about debugging. So thanks to you guys too.

I just wish more students would have a similar mentality. I've known people to not understand computers much at all, like hardware, networking software, or even just using art programs. And in his free time he made no effort to learn more about them, then he complains and asks for help when he doesn't understand something. That shit is ANNOYING, nobody be that guy.

>>2225

It's weird how quite a few people don't act like a team at DigiPen and instead treat each others work as untouchable. After my team got in the habit of regularly reviewing each other's code we all improved and were able to work more productively, and managed to make the task of adding animations in relatively easy for our artist (yes, that means we actually had to talk to our artist to understand how he worked)

THANK YOU. This is what made me leave my team and drop out a month early instead of just finishing the semester.

My team would take any criticism of their work as a personal affront. I mean, I get it – you only have so long to work on the game in between classes and studying and homework – but come on. The thing I spent the majority of first semester working on didn't work out so great later on, so we had to recode it as a team, and it only improved the final product. I wasn't mad; I just want the game to be good. It seemed like everyone else just wanted to be told that their work was awesome and that they were awesome for doing it.