Future Game Coders - Online Education or College?

An anonymous reader asks: "My cousin is about to graduate high school and wants to enter the game industry. I told him to get a day job (possibly as QA in a game studio) and get an online degree like DeVry's Game and Simulation Programming degree or The Art Institute of Pittsburgh's Game Art & Design degree. I have a BS and an MS in Computer Science, and I've only found what I learned mildly useful for my game programming hobby. Should he suck it up and get a 4-year degree, or is taking online courses focused on game development the way to go? Has anybody gotten one of these degrees and done well for themselves?"

My advice

[ajenteks]

Get the dayjob being a game tester, see how demanding and unlike playing games working in the field really is, and then go from there. Granted, it looks and sounds fun, but for every person who's bragging about how cool there job is there's probably a horror story to match it.

There's no real need to rush to college or start paying for speciality education right out of highschool. Make sure you like the smell the roses before you want to grow them.

I work in the industry...

[badboy_tw2002]

...and regularly hire programmers. The job interview generally goes pretty much like any other engineering position. If he wants to code, he needs to know how to code. Don't know how to write multi-threaded code? Sorry, no job. Never heard of a pointer? Don't need you. That's not to say a four year program is required, we've hired people from game schools as well. Generally they have a background in CS (working in IT, another BS, hobby programmer) that has given them exposure to hard programming topics. I've found that in general game college doesn't give you any real rigorous CS training, and if you want to be a programmer its no different in this industry than any other.

Oh, and QA won't help you get an engineering job. It will take time away from school. Better off spending that time writing a demo or something, as that would be more impressive than saying how you tested X and thought Y would be a better way to do it.

Re:Art, art, and more art

[JFitzsimmons]

As someone who works at simply modding other people's game engines, I can easily say that you have no idea what the fuck you're talking about. Games aren't just about having an engine that you can simply throw assets at and run off the assembly line (well, EA may think so). Coding is an extremely important part of game design. Even if I were to agree with your point, SOMEONE has to make these engines that you speak of.

Depending on where you'd like to go with it, you may or may not require a computer science degree. If you're looking to get into the hardcore parts of engine design then computer science may be for you. There's an awful lot of complicated concepts required at that level, both in terms of application design, and mathematics. For 3d engines you need to know a good deal about 3d vectors, matrices, quaternions. If you're looking at programming AI then you've got to have not only a solid foundation of understanding the mathematics of the engine but also AI's own fun programming style, such as finite state machines, and graphs (especially with respect to pathfinding), just to throw a couple of the more popular AI paradigms out there.

On the other hand, if you're just looking at doing game logic code, which is still vastly important to a game (since it handles the details of gameplay), then CS might not be as important. A strong foundation in programming and at least an understanding of some of the topics stated above is an asset. As a modder, this is where I stand now. My education isn't complete, and I simply don't have the time to be fiddling around with creating my own engines or modifying those that already exist.

Game logic includes things like defining how items are stored in a player's inventory, building the bridge between the inventory UI and the inventory in memory, how enemies are spawned, the interaction of agents with the environment, etc. While some may describe it as being more "menial" (i.e. some may claim that there is not a lot of challenge when hooking up an interface with an API), I would say that game logic is still highly stimulating and provides a good degree of challenging problems to be overcome. While engine designers may be making interesting innovations in the world of graphics and physics, the logic coders are the ones making interesting innovations in the world of gameplay. To pull a quick example, Gears of War's "active reload" is something that is handled by game logic and not the engine, and I consider this to be at least a little innovative.

To further a counter-point to parent, the Doom 3 engine was licenced to Human Head for the production of Prey. Human Head did not simply have a team of artists that put assets and maps into the engine until they had a game. There was still a vast amount of change that needed to be made to the engine and the game code to handle the new things that happened in Prey. Portals that could be shot and seen through, anti-gravity, the ability to leave your body, etc. all did not exist in Doom 3. These had to come from somewhere; the coders from Human Head, that worked on a pre-designed engine. "Completed" engines do not preclude programmers.

From an employment standpoint, I can offer no advice. I have never been employed at a development studio nor have I applied.

Re:what 4 year degrees are for

[GT_Alias]

I think "friends and networking" deserved its own bullet point (unless it fell under A). I wouldn't have imagined I'd maintain some of the contacts I have to-date, and they've led me to opportunities that would have been difficult to come by otherwise.