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Just saw a thread there and it sparked an area of thought I’m not really sure about that I would appreciate some thoughts on.
Which (if any) colleges doing games related degrees are adequately able to place students in games related jobs for third year work experience?
How many of the various college associated incubation units (invent in dcu, nova in ucd and I’m sure plenty of others) support games development companies at this time?
Given the comparative ease of developing and publishing for mobile, are any universities collaborating in events like Dare but where the output is an actual, saleable product?
Are third level students being taught how Enterprise Ireland might go about assisting the funding of these ventures?
Am I mad (or completely out of the loop) in wondering whether we should be getting our unplaced third year game development students to release a game they might make money out of?
Dave
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Well I know for sure that Dundalk doesn’t send it’s 3rd years out into the field for some EXTREAMLY valuable work experience. I’m after completing the course there last June and we didn’t get a shred of IT experience at all!
With regards to DARE, Dundalk really pushed for it’s students to apply and enter. Since the games dev course started in Dundalk in ’05 we’ve been entering our game ideas to DARE. So on that point I would have to congratulate Dundalk on pushing it’s students to enter. They were successful with 2 teams from the college getting into the DARE competition 2 years in a row.
We had a module in 4th year called Entreprenship that thought us how to go about getting funding and such, to set up our own companies. It wasn’t a huge module but did give us the basics to marketing our idea’s and trying to sell our designs and get companies set up.
I totally agree with your last point. However I dont think it should just be 3rd years. I think its should be, and more importantly, 4th years trying to develop a game that they can market!! At the end of the day, they are the ones out the door the following September. Because of my lack of experience in IT, game dev, web dev, etc. I’ve been forced to leave Ireland in search of work. Every company in Ireland are looking for candidates with x amount of years experience and for us graduates that don’t have 2 seconds worth of industry experience, it’s a total nightmare. So I totally agree with you that colleges that provide a games dev course should totally have a 3rd year work experience module, so that their students aren’t leaving college totally unexperienced!
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Same here up in Letterkenny IT. We have a group project in 3rd year and a individual project in 4th year. But heres a kicker we werent encouraged to create a game for our final year project this year.
In all honesty though how many students or courses would be equipped teaching wise or time wise to seriously think about the students being able to make a full game? I know with regards to course work and the main project this year there really isnt enough hours in the day as well as us not being at a taught level to be able to create a game that would be of a selling standard.
Even though I agree experience would be great could u name of the top of your head 5 "Games" companies in Ireland that would be willing to take anyone on even in a non-paid capacity?
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I would be disappointed if you couldn’t develop a mobile or other lightweight game in 6 months with a team of students. Dare does it in 10 weeks, and some people do it in 24 hours :)
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It’s odd but few universities see entrepreneurship as an option for the year out.
At StartVI we’ve got one games company starting up and they’d probably be interested in some free help now with a view to getting people on board officially once funding arrives.
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Yea we got it as a module rather than a year out. It was pretty good, but it could have tied in with the rest of the course better.
What sort of platform is the games company in StartVI thinking of developing on?? I’m not currently in the country at the minute but I’ve got several friends who recently graduated with me that would love the opportunity to get some experience!
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He’s no doubt on here but I think the initial platforms are iPhone and XNA.
As I mentioned elsewhere, we had a meeting which brought together 4 formative games companies* all in different stages of development and we already know about Dark Water Studios (signed up for the Steam beta! Yeoowww!) and Wee Man Studios. There’s a couple of others (Straandlooper, CanDo3D)
*the four were @johngirvin, @zero37, @conormcc and myself. :)
and here’s some photos from Thursdays event:
http://cimota.com/blog/2010/03/27/photos-from-thursdays-ingage/
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UU up the north have a great work placement programme in year 3. Know a few people who placed at intel and loved it.
Great idea, lots of logistics in fairness.
Should be part of a much wider drive by govt. -
In the DIT School of Computing:
We have an optional 6 month 3rd year placement that many students take advantage of and have placed students in games companies such as as Havok in the past.
In 4th year all the games students are doing games final year projects. We havent really promoted Dare as much as we should, but there are so many interesting competitions. We have 2 teams in games fleadh last year and came first. 3 teams this year and two amazing teams in the Irish finals of the Imagine Cup (which we are hosting on 29 April in DIT this year – you are all invited!) – not to mention 3 in the ACM challenge – and 2nd in Robocode this year.
There are group of third year students who have an XBLA Indi Game project in the works.
Bryan
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