Schools for game programming

[The VBer]

Okay, so now being a sophomore in high school, i guess it's not too late to be looking for a college to go to after graduating.
I'm not really sure where to find this information out since google hasn't really been of much help. Vbforums is a second home to me anyway

Isn't really too much criteria for a school i want to go to.. although location & money are a problem.
I'm interested into some type of programming, preferably game development.

As for location, i live in Central Pennsylvania. My sister is currently going to mount Aloysius college which is about a half an hour drive. I've been trying to find a college close to that, but no luck. Closest being about a 2:30 hour drive? (thanks google maps)
This brings me to a question about online schools -- Are they worth it? I've never done online schooling and have no idea how exactly everything works. But if i can't find a school close to home then i may look into it.

Lastly, money. Where ever i go needs to be equal to or less than $9,370 for a semester(took that off of Mount Aloysius's website) Reason for that is i know that my parents aren't exactly happy with my sister's tuition (you see why? haha) So I've been told that it's about my limit.

I'm not exactly sure what to be looking for. But this is my criteria. I'm just trying to find some schools that some of the people around here went to and research them to see if they'll work for me.

Thanks

[Jenner]

Honestly, the gaming industry is only just beginning to take any of these colleges seriously. If you really want to get into game development with a chance to be hired, my best recommendation is you need to dive into game design hardcore.

This means you need to produce something game related either as a team or solo. It can be some content for a game such as custom models, or levels; or it can be a mod for a game or it can even be an actual game designed from the ground up.

How you get to the point of producing something is up to you. If you think one of these colleges will help you, then by all means, go for it. What I'm trying to say though is it won't make any difference whether you have a degree or not from them; the gaming industry is highly competitive and only looks at work; not at degree.

A guy who is a high school dropout who teaches himself modding and programming and is a lead developer of a decent freelance Unreal Tournament 3 mod will be hired before a guy with a Masters in game design and computing from MIT who only has some student projects to show for his enormous cost of tuition.

The simple reason is, when it comes to game design, there's 1000 wanna-be's to 1 dedicated, motivated person.

A personal story though to think about:
I was once considered by Monolith Studios for a level design position because I released several highly detailed, some even ground-breaking (the game's first 4-team map) Team Fortress Classic maps to public domain. I got an email from the studio kinda out of the blue (SPAM in those days was almost non-existent and I had my email in all the readme files attached to the maps) informing me they were impressed by my maps and had some positions opening up for level design for a project they called "No One Lives Forever" and I was a consideration if I was interested. They asks if I had any examples of single-player maps; which unfortunately, I didn't, nor did I have any desire at the time to make any.

I kinda missed the boat there since "No One Lives Forever" turned out to be a pretty hot game. It's one of those things where I wonder how it might have turned out if I dropped my studies (I was in school for a Masters in Engineering at the time) and just worked hardcore into making some single-player levels to fire back at Monolith. Ahh well, no real regrets there. I wasn't in much of a position where even if I wanted to, I could have accepted without turning my life upside down.

Regardless, since that day, I try to keep close to the happenings in the gaming industry. I see the kind of people the studios hire and they all have one thing in common; they have all produced results of some form or another and to this day, all are self-taught, self-motivated people.

It takes no money to get the skills you need. Just dedication and persistence. Plenty of game engines are free. Programming languages are free. Modelers like Blender are free. Graphics programs like GIMP are free. There's also a million examples and whole sites dedicated to modding specific games and game engines; or writing your own game from scratch.

[Cander]

If you need more examples of what Jenner said:

Minh Le and Jess Cliffe, the guys who created Counter-Strike as a mod to Half Life were eventually employeed by Valve.

Trauma Studios which was put together to create the Desert Combat mod for Battlefield 1942 was bought up by DICE and they worked on Battlefield 2 until they eventually shut down the Trauma offices. While not exactly a totally happy ending it does illustrate dedicated modders being snapped up by the big boys. The developers at Trauma were however picked up by THQ.

And you can be sure there are plenty other lesser known cases.

Well designed levels and modifications look pretty good on resumes for game designers. Not to say you shouldn't learn other programming skills as well, but good design skills is a neglected priority when people choose to become game developers.

[The VBer]

Yeah, that's the way i was looking at it.
But the reason i would like to go to college is to actually learn the languages. Sure i could buy some books and stuff like that which i already have 2 fairly beginner books for visual basic. But i would like to learn it in a classroom type setting.

There are online courses and tutorials for programming languages, but I feel more comfortable in having a person right there in front of me teaching me the material. Otherwise it just all seems kinda cheap and useless to me. (not saying that it is)
That's the reason why i thought it would be a good idea to go to a school to do it, but i just have no clue where.


EDIT: Maybe instead of college tuition I should look into a new computer My parents may go for that if i explained the reasoning behind it hahaha.

[Jenner]

Going to even a community college to take programming classes might help you as well. Still, the core concepts of VB.NET and C# can easily be picked up in any "Learn VB.NET in 21 days" style book. Get a book, plow through the lessons page-by-page and you'll be pretty competent. I'd actually recommend learning C# for gaming. It's a lot like VB.NET except it's case-sensitive and blocks everything with {} . It's also has more support in the gaming community than VB.NET. You won't have to translate examples.

Afterward, decide on a project; preferrably something game related like a card game or simple arcade game. Heck, make solitaire or poker, or Uno, or Tetris, or Pac man. Something simple to apply your new training. Get stuck and hunt for help.

Next, move onto game APIs and game engines. Get XNA Game Studio and maybe an engine like FlatRedBall. Make a spiffy 2D game or two from that. Something you'd find available from Big Fish games. Heck, with FlatRedBall and XNA, you can write a hidden object game engine in a day. It's getting the graphics that's the hard part.

When taking breaks from programming, teach yourself GIMP or Photoshop if you have it. Learn how to make textures. Learn how the alpha channel works. Next, move onto Blender and make some simple models, non-animated models. Make a UV map of it and texture it. Load them into your game engine and move them around...

At this point, you're actually in the upper 1% of people who are trying to learn game design. Most never get to the point of downloading a game engine, let alone tell one to render and texture a model they created into one. It's a HUGE step.

In three months, you'll have taught yourself what it would have taken 2 years at some college and many thousands of dollars.

Move onto a 3D engine like Torque3D. Make a level with the built in level builder. Build your first animated model in Blender and rig it with bones. Make a simple animation loop and load the model into Torque3D and tell it to loop the animation. Add maybe a sound effect or two. Congrats, now you're in the upper 0.1%

Download a simple physics engine and apply it to your model... ok, you get the idea.

Basically, you can work yourself into a nice, broad overview of all the disciplines of game design without a lot of the nitty-gritty work because high end 3D game engines are already built! Don't re-invent the wheel. The programming you'll be doing is all the tie-together coding to make the engine do what you want it to do.

[The VBer]

Thanks for the advice. I was planning on learning either C++ or C#. C# shouldn't be too hard of a transition from VB.
The two books that i have now are
'Visual Basic 2008 in 24 hours' and 'Visual Basic 2008 Step by Step'
They weren't too bad.
I already knew most of what was in the books, but there were a couple things that i learned. They helped me cure some bad habits i got from watching tutorials on youtube of programming. Haha.

I've made a death match type game which I've been meaning to improve on heavily. I think I'll eventually make it a project of mine to make it into an 'actual' game instead of a couple buttons with random numbers and text

[Shaggy Hiker]

Judging from some of the questions we get from folks in school, your desire to learn in a classroom setting has to be considered questionable. I'm sure there are good courses out there, though it sounds like you would be a bit above the intro courses you might be required to start with in college, but there sure seem to be plenty of teachers who are behind the curve and teaching only yesterdays news. Heck, it's hard enough for folks in the field to keep up, would teachers do any better?

[The VBer]

Next year I'll get a little bit of a taste of programming in school since I'll be able to take one of the two programming classes that my high school has. It's 'computer science with java', a math type of course. The other class offered is 'AP computer science with java'. The AP class requires the other class to already be taken so I'll probably take the AP class my senior year.

Ugh.

[Jenner]

I'd love nothing more than for you to succeed with your goals and get into game design. I've become somewhat disillusioned with the gaming industry as of late. Few things are innovative anymore. The average console title holds my attention for about 3 days before getting tossed in my dustbin.

I've mostly been replaying older titles and searching independent studios for real gems. I've also been hunting down independent modern remakes of older titles; game designs and types that haven't been seen in a long time.

Where's the next XCom or Elite? Who's going to make the next Sims or Doom? Is SimCity 4 and Rollarcoaster Tycoon 3 the end-all-be-all of the tycoon games? Is Half-Life 2 the final evolution in first-person-shooters that all others copy off of? Every now and then, something like Portals or Spore comes out and gets me all excited, but such releases are few and far between.

As game engines get more advanced and more powerful and programming languages get easier to use, more and more great independent games are coming about and that gives me hope. God knows big studios won't throw money at anything innovative anymore unless your name is Will Wright or Peter Molyneux.

The gaming industry needs some new blood and more of the younger generation getting into the technicals of game development. Godspeed VBer, I salute you.

[Shaggy Hiker]

To expand on some of what Jenner stated: Throughout the 90s, the push was probably just to do more with graphics. Wolfenstein 3D opened up a whole world, but was strip casting on a rectangular world. Doom pushed further, and others followed along. These days, you have whole worlds, like Oblivion and Fallout, where you can move around, and it is unlikely that a game can wow the world through graphical improvements alone. Perhaps you can make water look more realistic, and leaves move more naturally, but those changes are not going to sell games the way the Doom engine sold games.

Instead, you need an immersive storyline, a wide open world, or something really clever with the physics or game evolution. The whole Id Software storyline was very linnear, but each new version could sell on the graphical improvements alone. These days, graphical improvements are nothing but icing on the cake, and you will have to sell on story improvements.

[The VBer]

Would i be better off learning C# for a smoother transition from Visual Basic? Or should i work on C++.

I'm sure I'll need to know C++ for really almost any job i would go into in this field. But from what i understand the syntax in C# is closer fairly close to C++. At least closer than C++ is to VB.

Better off doing:
VB -> C# -> C++
-or-
VB -> C++

Although, it wouldn't hurt to do both.

[Jenner]

C# would be better because it's "supported" by more game engines. When I say "supported" I don't mean that you can't get almost all of these same game engines to also work just fine with VB.NET. You can use VB.NET for just about everything you can do in C#. They're both .NET, and thus, they're both talking to the exact same framework.

What I mean by "supported" is that most of these game engines out there seem to choose C# as their primary supported language, and thus, all their examples, forum help and any plugin support for Visual Studio such as templates, will all be for C#.

I haven't met a .NET game engine yet though I couldn't use with VB.NET as well as C#. Even XNA which has a fancy content manager built for Visual Studio can be bent to VB.NET's will. But in the end, it's probably less trouble at your position to just learn C#.

Personally, I consider C# to be VB.NET's case-sensitive, whiny bastard cousin who is loved about exactly half as much from daddy Intellisense. Still, more people than I seem to like C# for some reason; especially for gaming and it's really not too hard to get used to once you get over the totally unnecessary case sensitive nature of it (probably the biggest hurdle).

In the long run, it is easier since you're not translating all the examples and forum questions back and forth. I've started using it for my game writing; though if there was a way to make it non-case sensitive and for Intellisense to be as smart and responsive as it is in VB.NET, I'd jump on it in a heartbeat.