>>791>>792After semester four, you're no longer a CS student, basically. You take the GAM classes that the BAGDs take and you submit playtest reports instead of code reports. The actual classes you took were legit CS classes, but now you're seen by the school as a Designer.
I spoke with a fellow sophomore BSGD about this sort of thing and at one point, he said what I said above, almost verbatim: "I don't actually like programming, I just like doing programming as a step towards getting my ideas into the game."
And guess what? He's not a great programmer, and our game code is littered with "just making it work" instead of the finesse that makes the game go from mediocre student game to amazing game. I'm not going to go into specifics such as to not be identifiable.
The BSGD program can go a couple of ways.
One way is like this guy I'm talking about, and others like him. You feel good because Holcomb tells you you're a good game designer and cool guy because you got good grades on most or all of your GAT210/211 projects. You then think "yeah I'm a good game designer, plus I learned what I had to in those CS classes, so hell yeah, I'll be a great gameplay programmer."
This is not necessarily the case. Learning traditional game design will help your video game design, but these past two semesters have proven that GAT classes alone are not enough to teach GD students how to make a fun video game. But these designers can't see that, they think "I'm a great game designer and programmer," despite being neither.
Another way the BSGD program can go is like how it did for me. You're an above-average programmer coming into DigiPen, who thinks about video game design all the time, has made dozens half-finished games on his own in the past, but you're bad at math unless it directly applies something tangible, like video games. You start off the first couple of semesters and go "okay, this programming teaching is awesome, I never knew C/C++ this deep before, but man, these game design classes are kind of lame because it's all about broad concepts like 'the intensity curve' and shit, and the rest is all about board games. Oh well, this must just be because it's my first year, surely I'll learn more about
video game design next year."
Then the second year comes and nope, still nothing about video game design that you haven't heard a million times before from GAT classes and The Rhino. Yes, we get it, intensity curves, mechanics-dynamics-experiences, intensity curves, playtest reports, intensity curves, playtest reports, intensity curves, and… did I mention intensity curves? Also intensity curves.
Then you realize that, despite being both an engine architect
and game designer on your team this past year, going forward, you're going to be basically a QA lead and gameplay scripter. You like scripting gameplay stuff, and fine-tuning user interactions to make them as fun as possible, but the idea of being judged by my fucking playtest reports sounds horrible. I would like to spend a week just fine-tuning the way my character runs, jumps and shoots, without having to do a playtest necessarily
this week. Also I'm going to be treated the same as a BAGD, which means the same as absolute fucking garbage.
Combine all this with the fact that you realize that playing a lot of different types of games and just playing around with how their mechanics work, thinking about how and
why they make the game awesome, is a
far better way to learn how to make fun video games than anything we've fucking learned so far at this goddamn hellhole of a school, and you do what I do, and drop the
fuck out at the end of semester four. I'm going to have a decent knowledge of data structures, because Mead is an amazing teacher, and I'll know C/C++ better than many CS graduates at other schools, because I had to make two high-performance game engines from scratch (including object allocators, templated component-based systems, and so forth).
I won't have a degree, but I'll do what I can to prove my technical skills to any programming job that will have me. Hopefully I'll get to use my design skills at that job, and maybe I'll even get a video game job! But at this point I can't care. As long as I'm out of this laughable farce called the Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Game Design at DigiPen Institute of Technology,
anything would make me happier and feel more fulfilled in my life.
Nothing is more fun to me than working on video games, but shit, compared to putting up with DigiPen's bullshit, even a menial job programming fucking databases or some shit would be a step up. I can always dick around with making a game engine on the side if I feel like it. Getting paid money to put up with a tiny fraction of the bullshit I put up with at DigiPen sounds amazing.
Fuck DigiPen.