>>2352
Starting DigiPen in the BAGD program is like buying a game on Steam that was on Greenlight, should still be on Greenlight, but the developers decided to release it all the way and charge full price for it, despite it being a shitty, broken mess. To their credit, the developers are actively working to fix it, but they're so far up their own ass with ideas of what makes the game good or what it even means to be a good game (here the metaphor bleeds over into reality but just roll with it) that they keep making more problems while in the process of fixing other problems. And instead of doing an Arkham Knight and just pulling the damn thing off Steam while they fix their fucking shit, they keep selling it, suckering in more customers each… year… okay, metaphor time is over.
BAGD is a degree program where you learn to be a Game Designer and not much else. You learn some scripting, true, but you are constantly told that you will be useful to your game teams and hireable for companies in the future solely because of your 1337 design skillz0rz. This is actually a noble goal, because yeah, having pure designers on any game team, professional or otherwise, should be an incredibly useful thing that everyone wants to have. Unfortunately:
1.) AAA studios largely don't want pure game designers, because
2.) "Game design" isn't a real, accepted-upon field of study, which is why
3.) DigiPen doesn't know how to teach it, so they keep making shit up as they go, constantly telling you that you're doing important work, that grinding away at GAT board game projects for the first two years will somehow result in you learning what makes video games fun in any way shape or form, also by the way,
4.) While you're learning these things, you need to already have known them plus a lot more, because the video games you make as a team are graded in part on how good the design is, but
5.) "How good the design is" is based on random bullshit that these former game designers who run the game design program continuously pull out of their asses. They haven't worked on real games in forever and instead just presumably get super high and think about what game design really means, man. Meanwhile,
6.) Your team will hate you, unless you have inherent game design skills that you honed on your own before coming to DigiPen, or unless you can code (because you taught yourself before coming to DigiPen). They will absolutely not appreciate you just mindlessly regurgitating the shit you learned today in GAT because none of that shit matters when it comes to practically making a video game, especially when the programmers don't know what they're doing, either, because they're teaching themselves as they go. However,
7.) The idea of "being a game designer" and "not having to worry about that gross coding stuff" is enough of a sell for any idiot 18-year-old and his or her rich parents who think their kid play too many of them video games and why don't they do something productive like us Microsoft employees, hey y'know what, there's that DigiPen place where you learn to make video games, let's enroll you there son/daughter. Then, you either:
a.) learn how shitty DigiPen is and drop out in disgust
b.) learn how shitty DigiPen is and change to a different, slightly less shitty degree program
c.) delude yourself into thinking that GAT classes are gospel, The Rhino is the messiah, everything you're doing is Important for the Industry, and writing a hundred pages about some shitty board game you invented two nights ago will somehow, in any way teach you anything you need to know about designing video games.
TL;DR BAGD is broken and DigiPen don't give a fuck cuz they're swimming in cash
*deep breath*
>>2352
>I didn't want to choose RTIS originally because you don't need to be a master of programming to make a game in Unreal/Unity (since I don't see the point in making engines from scratch after college)
What the fuck is wrong with you kid? If your goal is to work at a mobile game company making free-to-play crap for the rest of your life (not a bad job, but since you're a freshman BAGD I'm assuming that isn't the case), you're not going to be using Unity to make video games professionally. Even if you were, you still need to know how to write some damn code, only a fraction of what you do in Unity is dragging and dropping assets and components around. If you're working at a AAA game developer, you'll probably be using whatever proprietary shit they use. Regardless, even if you found a job at a place like Facepunch making Rust in Unity, you still need to know how to fucking write code. Pure game designers are worthless. Games are made from code. Learn to code. Don't be afraid of the code.