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I am a high school senior in Albany, GA. I love video games, anime, comics and Asian culture. What I want to do is go to school for creating video games. I am currently an amateur level graphic designer. I am pretty good at what I do and have some awards I have won.
There is a local 2-year college here called Darton State College. I have applied to the school and got accepted into the Associates in Computer Science. I am in no means good at math. My plans until now was to struggle through the program to get to where I want to go. I have very recently looked into the differences between game designers and game developers. From my understanding, game designers work with the graphics and character development of the game. This is what I want to do. Game developers do the programming and don’t really design anything but the mechanics that make the game (not that that is an easy job to do.) I live in the state of Georgia and am looking at programs. These are the two options I have come up with in solving my career outlook problem:
Get a degree in Computer Science with a Concentration in Game Development and Programming. This ensuring I have a good job and am not narrowed to Game Design which is hard to find a job in. I go to Darton State College, get a two year degree in Computer Science and do a transfer. Once again I am NOT good in math.
Or go to an art school in the area, likely SCAD or Full Sail, after doing core curriculum for the degree pathway at Darton State College and outsourcing as much as possible. I am scared of this path because of the tuition cost for these schools and the job outlook for these types of careers.
Is there anyone in the field that can help me with looking over this situation? Are there any SCAD graduates that can tell me about the Interactive design and game development degree at SCAD or their experience? Are there any game design or game developers that can help me with figuring this out?
I am also posting this under Arts and similar categories.
Hi, I work in the video game industry (in UX, but I work closely with designers and developers). Your general notions about the differences between designers and developers is sort of true. These days most designers are also very technically savvy; they’re often not just responsible for the art and character development itself but will also write code/program the character and AI behavior in the game as well. I recommend that you take a look at some job ads for game designers at large studios these days and see what skills they’re asking for: most of them want someone who knows some coding/programming.
I think a path where you study both computer science and art/design is a good path, but you don’t want to go deeply into debt. And, if you more generally love games and tech, you’ll want to leave yourself open for a variety of jobs in the field. A lot of people don’t start out in games - they move laterally from another area of tech into games. There will be way more positions open for you with a major in computer science and a minor in game design and/or art, and you also don’t have to formally study art in order to work in the field - you just need good samples. So path #1 is way better than path #2 - it will open more of the kinds of doors you want to open, and it’ll be far less expensive.
When you say that you’re not good at math, what do you mean? Do you mean that you don’t get it immediately but can understand it with some studying and effort, or do you mean that you struggle even when given a lot of time and space and help to do it?
Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately, I live in Albany, Georgia. This city is ranked with one of the worst K-12 education systems in America. I know some deans of the colleges located here and they are not happy about the students that enroll into their school after attending the public schools here. I have not taken any courses in programming unfortunately. I have been to codeacademy (and only codeacademy) to start on some languages. There aren’t a lot of resources or people that I know that can help me learn coding without the help of a college professor. I’m not too sure on how to learn coding languages or where to start. If I have an adequate amount of time and amount of help in ANY subject, I can do a great job. I’m worried about the stories they tell me about college and deadlines. I’ve NEVER taken any rigorous math courses (or anything too rigorous).
Do programs under computer science ever focus on game graphics or character design? I also don’t know of any schools that teach both game design and computer science in Georgia. My fear is that I get stuck with a primarily math and coding based job when I want to do creative aspects of the career also.
If you’re interested in an introduction to computer science class to take outside of school to get you somewhat familiar with coding and prepare you better for college, I’d suggest taking cs50 on edx.
After looking over the program, I have enrolled in the course. Thanks for the advice. If there is anything else you can help me with, please feel free to comment.
Are you a senior in high school? It’s okay if you haven’t taken any programming classes yet - a lot of students (including CS majors) don’t start until they get to college.
I understand being nervous and apprehensive, but the only way to know whether you’ll be successful at something is to try. Don’t avoid a great major and career out of fear - try it out and see if you can handle it.
Computer science curricula don’t generally have a focus on game design or character design; some colleges might have a class or two on it, but most don’t. You’d have to go to a college that has a special program in it. Luckily, the state of Georgia does have a public university with a game design program: Georgia Tech! There’s a [computational media](http://cm.lmc.gatech.edu/) major. But if you can’t transfer into GT, studying computer science at another university will work. You could always do an internship in game design and/or get a certificate in it later, or study graphic art as a minor.
I did NOT know about this… Okay maybe i’ll give it a try after all. I’ll try to visit the school again. I’ve been but we only went to the student center. lol. Seems like a plan. Hopefully everything goes great.
Don’t worry about learning a bunch of languages. Choose one language and learn it well. Don’t just learn to “code,” learn to program properly. If you know one language very well and you become well-acquainted with principles of programming, it becomes relatively easy to transfer that knowledge and learn another language.
The good thing about programming and coding is that you don’t need any formal instruction to learn it. Like you’ve already done, use the internet for resources. One of my favorites is Learn Code The Hard Way (http://learncodethehardway.org/), which I used to learn the basics of C, and I’m sure the sections for other languages there are also good. Lately, I’ve been learning Java, and have found Oracle’s Java documentation/tutorials helpful (https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/index.html).
I got some people that said the more languages I know the more qualified I am for a job. Is that true? I know in some job descriptions, they ask that the person knows one language. I’m thinking they have to be very good at programming that language. I think I wanna try Java first because I know it’s important. Or HTML 5 (I think that’s what it’s called)
It’ll depend on the job (and the industry), but sure, yeah, generally, the more languages you know, the better. Some jobs require knowledge of multiple languages, others require knowledge of just one or two. However, my point wasn’t that you should only learn one language, period, but rather that you should start with one language. If you learn one language well, and you learn the concepts of programming well, then that can make it easier to learn your second language, and third, and fourth, etc. In other words, focus on one language for now. Worry about others later.
I’m not entirely sure what’s common in game design, but Java and C++ are both good ones to learn (since they’re both object-oriented languages, which is always in high demand), as is C, arguably. You should also consider starting with Python, which is used for many applications and is probably a more friendly introduction to programming than the others.
HTML is not a programming language, it’s a markup language that helps browsers interpret and display web pages. It doesn’t hurt to be familiar with it, but if you want to learn to program, it’s not going to help.
[quoteI got some people that said the more languages I know the more qualified I am for a job. Is that true? I know in some job descriptions, they ask that the person knows one language. I’m thinking they have to be very good at programming that language. I think I wanna try Java first because I know it’s important.
[/quote]
Yes, sure, the more languages you know the better, but you’re only in high school. Focus on learning one really well. It’s easier to learn additional ones once you know one.
I’m not a dev so I can’t speak to this super-well, but from what I’ve seen in the industry C++, Java, and Python all seem like good languages to know for game design.
I think I’ll start with Java. And I have to take the cs50 class. It looks amazing. How much math is used in all of this? I see I have to learn up to Calculus III but how much will I actually use?
Strictly speaking, you don’t need to know math beyond arithmetic to program, for the most part. But it all depends on the purpose. If you’re writing a program to solve a system of equations, you’ll need to be familiar with linear algebra. If you’re writing a program to model multi-body dynamics, you’ll probably have to understand multivariable calculus and differential equations, too, as well as how to apply those to dynamics. If you’re doing signal processing, you’ll want to be familiar with multivariable calculus and a number of algorithms. If you’re doing statistical analysis, you’ll want to be familiar with statistics, at the least.
So, math is needed to understand and implement different algorithms and techniques. But a lot of programming also doesn’t require much of this math. It depends entirely on the application you’re going for. You can learn to program without knowing math. Understanding the math allows you to use programming to address different types of problems.
I know. I planned to see their program too. I wanted to focus more on game graphics and GA Tech’s Computational Media program seems to do both the graphics and programming aspect. I was split between SCAD or a Computer Science major somewhere in Georgia. Many places in Georgia have a Gaming Track but I was looking for a bit more focus on the graphics and art of the game as well.