Seamus P's Space

I spent a bit of time creating some audio track for use as background music in my FYP game. The are listed below if anyone wants to have a listen. I used a pretty old bit of software that I had laying around at home (Ejay Dance 2+). It provided a load of samples (drums, etc) that were pretty useful. The old thing is that they were mostly Techno / Dance type ones. Anyways have a listen if you like...

A week or two ago my class got an email from the head of the department asking if any of us could spare a few minutes to talk to a secondary school student that was thinking of applying for  to do our course (Games and Multimedia). I said that I would be available and had more or less forgotten about it until I bumped into the potential student and the department head on the stairs in our building. So I ended up talking to the guy for about an hour, even though I had not thought much about what I was going to say.

What would I like to have known before I applied?

Without even going into the course specifics I think that there are so many people that think, I like to play computer games so Games Developement might be a good thing to do in college. This may be a little bit exaggerated but there does seem to be those that think this way, having no idea of the technical stuff that you need to get into. Even now I often find myself having difficulty translating what I have in my head into some real on screen, those that suggest that they can do this easily I would think perhaps have simple ideas in their heads

What area of game development do you want to get into?

Many people seem to want to get into game development but do not know what specific area they want to get into, design, production, programming / engineering to name a few. I think that like many people I always started with the plan of being a programmer, A.I. / Graphics / whatever did not really matter, I just wanted to be a programmer.  As the time has passed and we have covered different areas I have to say that this has probably changed a bit. While I like programming I also seem drawn toward the design side of things, especially after a module that we did last semester (Writing Games Analysis). We covered many “less technical” aspects of games like Narratology  and Ludology and also discussed Serious Games. Some of this was a real eye-opener and I only wish that we had covered it earlier in the course.

When I asked the potential student what exactly he wanted to do in games he seemed a bit confused, but then answered “programming”. With that answer we could get into the debate over if a traditional CS degree is better that a Games Degree.  I would think that if you wanted to be a programmer, as long as you were doing the correct language in college (C++ I suppose for those that want to get into games development) you should be pretty well on the way to being a game programmer. But with a traditional CS degree you do so subjects that seem a waste of time if you want to get into games development, e.g. Databases, Document Architecture, etc. (correct me if I am wrong) but then again you would find the same on my course if all you wanted to do was be a programmer. As we are doing Games and Multimedia we seem to have covered some “Multimedia” modules that I really would not have missed that much, Digital Audio, Digital Video, Perceptual Systems. Most of my class would be happy to get rid of the “Multimedia” part of the course and do more game specific ones, I think.

It also amazes me how many new CS students don’t seem to realise that math skill are necessary. While the maths that we covered was by no means difficult the better that you are at maths, the easier you will probably find the programming side of things, I have a good idea that two of probably the best programmers in my class are also quite handy with the maths side of things. Daniel or Damien any comments? Chances that Damien is reading this are pretty slim . We could have done with a few more maths modules on the course, it’s a skill that most of the technical games areas require.

Anyways I have waffled on a bit too long, forgive any mistakes and terrible worded paragraphs, the was just now way that I was going to read back over that ;)

Until the next time.