I hate to bring this up, as game school questions have been everywhere on Gamedev.net since forever. I had heard from all places, including here, that all these game schools suck. I hardly take anyone's word unless they have experience in what they are talking about. That being said, this GDC, me (a DigiPen student), went around to talk to these other college students. Colleges: Westwood College Online, DeVry, Brown College, Collins College, another 1 or 2. So, I went around asking people what their experience was, what languages they know, if they are big on graphics and 3d math, etc. So every senior project I saw was a 2d simple game. Most of them use Torque and TorqueScript. None of them had experience writing any tools or exporters. Had never dealt with simple things like shadow mapping. This one guy was telling me he does design, programming and art. So he wasn't professionally skilled in any of them and I viewd his portfolio and it was bad. Almost all of these people quoted, "It's a 4 year degree in 3 years." Not sure how that works out exactly, or why they even state that. I mean digipen is 154 credits (5 years worth of credits, typically finished in 4), but nobody EVER advertises it that way. Sadly, talking to DeVry, they apparently had a competition, and brought their best students (which were saying all the same). As for DigiPen, I used to talk smack about it because I always wanted more out of class, and to learn amazing graphics stuff like SSAO and be able to make next-gen games, but they have taught me very well as a CS degree. And just finishing a game every year from scratch, I have learned a lot, and have been able to answer/finish plenty of game programming tests. I know people still want to say that DigiPen is like other game schools and don't know shit, but I'm telling you that you are wrong. Thats the end of my thoughts. People can still be good and come from any college, but these kids that are banking on those schools and no outside studying, are completely lost. Anyone have other first hand experience with these schools, friends in these degrees, hired anyone from there?

That's the problem with all degrees in a sense. You get what you put into them. On another note my CS degree is really nice. It's given me a lot of coverage into a lot of CS related theories.

That's one of the biggest reasons I actually wanted to go to college. I wanted to meet professors and learn what they know and it's really interesting when you find out what interests them.

I have some friends in my CS degree that are just in for the ride and have no interest in programming or expanding what they've learned in classes. They probably aren't going to go far, but at least they might get a small job. Shooting into the games industry with what you're describing sounds like a death march in this economy.

Some people will "bank" on anything that seems to promise results and that they don't have to think about. University is a word that implies knowledge upon completion to most people. This is not actually the case, though it doesn't hurt. Great personal investment is required in anything you wish to excel at.

You didn't talk to any Full Sail students?

If it's competition into the industry you desire, talk to some of us ;)

Quote: Original post by DavidNeal
You didn't talk to any Full Sail students?

If it's competition into the industry you desire, talk to some of us ;)

Agreed, if you are looking for a comparison worth making regarding DigiPen then compare it to something of it's caliber. Full Sail has been absolutely outstanding so far and I have already learned so much! I've met someone that has come from Collins, I believe, and he said, comparing their program to Full Sail's, that it was leaps and bounds better.

These smaller schools are just little degree mills trying to pump some profit out of people who either don't do their research or think it's the easy way into the industry. Sure there are the gamers that come to our schools and manage to skate by but they usually don't make it to far into the industry, where as the people that I've met with more of a developer mindset ( more concerned about getting certain aspects of class down pact instead of worrying about how soon they can get home to play WoW ) and those are the ones that really do well and come out of school having taken full advantage of it with a ton of skills.

Sadly it's rare for the good students to make the gossip and all these guys that skate by class and end up getting a job and failing miserably there along with the smaller degree mill type schools are what give the bigger schools a bad name. All in all it doesn't matter what other people think as long as you feel you are doing the right thing to get you to where you want to be.

Yea you guys didnt have a booth this year. And I have heard about you guys getting around. I interviewed at High Moon and they said they have some FullSail guys. I think you guys are more game design than low-level algorithms/data structures..? All I know is that you guys work with Unreal 3 engine.

We go over game design in a couple classes, but it's centered more around programming. We don't get to the easy stuff until we understand the lower-level topics (use of char pointers before being allowed to work with strings, making our own dynamic arrays before using vectors, directX and openGL before wrapper classes, things like that).

We have a particularly challenging class that's more or less our "midterm" for the entire course. We are teamed up by the faculty and are to make a game in two months. You don't get to pick your teammates and I can swear, while they claim to team us up at random, I'm sure they stick the good students with the lazy ones. You are to have particular features done at milestones set throughout the two months. The class is notorious for having a "Wheel of Misfortune" that each group has to spin two times, each with various bad things that happen to your group, ranging anywhere from "Add a feature" to "Localize your game (make it a different language)" or even swapping teammates! The whole course is tough, but that particular class was the most challenging for me, especially the part of having to deal with the lazy one in our group that we charged with making our level editor....lesson learned.

Quote: Original post by dpadam450
Yea you guys didnt have a booth this year. And I have heard about you guys getting around. I interviewed at High Moon and they said they have some FullSail guys. I think you guys are more game design than low-level algorithms/data structures..? All I know is that you guys work with Unreal 3 engine.

Actually the course has little to do with the design, they transferred a lot of that over to a Game Art degree, the Game Development program is mostly programming. Hell we even have a whole data structures class but just like David said we start by learning the basics of C++ and the basic dynamic memory on top of the complex math behind it all Calc/Trig, Linear Alg, and Physics then we move on to both low level and high level topics. Game Development Course List