Need Guidance

[Anonymous]

Hey people, just signed up to the boards today. I was researching on some games development courses and the two I found most appealing are;

BSc in Multimedia and Computer Games Development, UL
and
BSc. in Computer Games Development Carlow IT

I’m from Cork, and I’ll probably just find accommodation wherever I go. But I don’t know which course to choose. Is the UL course too focused on multimedia rather than the games part? and is the course in Carlow as good as what I’ve read?
Any and all help would be appreciated.

[Anonymous]

Presumably you want to become a games programmer.

If so my advice would be not to do either. Go do a Computer Science degree at any of the Universities in Ireland. If your from Cork you have a CS degree in U.C.C. ( which I personally did and now work in games ). Wherever you do a CS degree it will be very much down to how much work you put in you’ll get out of it. Coasting by doing marketing/ecommerce/web modules to pad out your credits are pretty much a waste of time, you’ll get no game job with them.

Typically, when choosing a CS degree you should be looking to see a substancial amount of programming ( C/C++/JAVA/C# whatever). I say whatever bcause if you can program one you can learn the others in your own time ( this is what you’ll have to do if you want to make games for a living). Basically, you’ll use this course to more get into the mind of thinking in objects, data organisation etc.
Next the CS degree should have modules in data structure and system architecture. Both of these are crucial to a game programmer from everything to getting the most out of your system to writing good efficient ai algorithms etc.

Other modules which are nice in CS degrees include networking, graphics, ai etc. But I stress try to find a CS degree with a bit of maths to it; calculus, statistics, numerical analysis. This is probably one of the must haves for making games. You dont have to be a genius but you should be comfortable with maths, notation, proves. Generally, a good ability to reason about variables and how to reorganis the various formulas etc to achieve what you want. i.e. trig, linear algebra, coodinate systems etc..

Best of luck with a course choice and remember alot of the work which will get you into games will be stuff you do in your own time (uni will just get you the piece of paper and help organise you and equip you with the skills to build on). So you can probably get a jump on it now.
Download Visual Express C#/C++, get your onto the forums ( http://www.gamedev.net, msdn) and start learning the languages so you can start on your way.

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