Video Game Design Colleges

(FYI this is not me but it is the real Digipen. I still live a mile from it as Digipen is located across the 520 Freeway in Redmond, WA from Microsoft where I work.)

Ok so there are a lot of schools dedicated to only teaching you about how to design and code video games but are any of them good? Well here’s my story of Digipen.edu for you to decide. Keep in mind this all took place from 2000 to 2004 so things may have changed (actually I know they have because the courses and teachers changed a lot).

Every year included a Math course every semester along with some kind of programming course every semester.

First year at Digipen:

Text based game, windows programming, C programming. Excellent intro to the programming process.

Second year at Digipen:

DirectX, C++, Assembly, 2D game with online. 21 credits a semester and one of the hardest years of my life. After this year I was able to actually build a game from scratch. Best year of my Academic life.

Third year at Digipen:

3D theory and implementation, 3D animation, 3D game. Add another D and things get incredibly complicated and this year show’d why. Another hard year where I came out so much more educated.

Fourth year at Digipen:

Show off what you’ve learned and take a bunch of high level programming and Math classes of questionable significance. Ok so this year was my least favorite due to the uselessness of some of the courses and the insane amount of time and effort needed to make a 3D game that doesn’t completely and totally suck. Overall an excellent year as well though.

After the first year something like 75% of the slackers and wannabes were gone so things got much more exciting in the socializing department after that point.

All in all from what I’ve heard about places like Full Sail and other “design” schools that advertise constantly is that you won’t learn anything at those schools and it’s just a waste of time and money.

I guess you can be the judge of whether my education was a waste, here are some of my recent works:

http://www.gamebrink.com/

http://www.fantasy-mmorpg.com/

http://digipen.edu/main/Gallery_Games_2002#Drop_Drop (Third Year Game At Digipen, I’m Jeromy Stroh)

After screwing around with that stuff for a few years after graduation and working on a few prototypes for XBOX Live Arcade I now work at Microsoft on the Expression Web team as my first love has always been the web.

I think I would call Digipen a success