Video Game Design Uc Santa Cruz Ciriculum

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UC Santa Cruz Video Game Design Major - A Forum Thread for GameBanana

Worth it?

There's only one semester left until the damn school year is finally over, but I still haven't figured out whether I want to go to UC Santa Cruz for this major. In terms of the class, I've taken note of both positive and negative viewpoints. Those who are against it say that it's a waste of a degree, ans serves as a title, more than anything. They advise that people are better off getting technical skills from other majors (computer programming and the like), rather than from such a questionable degree. This leads to the concern that by majoring in video game design, I'm basically bottle-necking my education and career opportunities. On the other hand, the teacher (Michael Mateas, co-developer of Facade) seems like an extremely competent person, and from what many of those who've taken the class said, he really gets to the point (as in, no sugar-coating or over-glorification). http://www.cs.ucsc.edu/sites/default/files/game-design-details.pdf http://www.cs.ucsc.edu/sites/default/files/bscs-cgd-questions.pdf The above descriptions look pretty legit. The course seems pretty well-rounded too, which is great because although I'm leaning heavily towards video game design, I'm also bouncing between 3d modeling/animation, film-making, or something else technically or story-telling oriented. So now I'm facing a dilemma. I know that I'll be able to pull through with or without this particular major (it's mostly a matter of dedication), but I feel that if I don't take it, I'll be passing up a MAJOR opportunity. At the same time, I fear that it may end up being a waste of time, or merely something that can be self-taught without a degree. [On a side-note, is UC Santa Cruz any good? I've been given the impression that I'm either gonna hate it or love it.]

I just thought that at least a few of you guys might be knowledgeable about this :P

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It's impossible for anyone to be knowledgeable about this. Game development degrees popped up recently. Sure, you can claim game "design" has been around a while, but those are actually design classes. Design is useless without the skill to actually create. Anywho, judging by the course names, you'll learn what you need to know and being a UC, it's going to have good computer science courses. (UC Berkley basically created, well, everything. TCP, IP, BSD, etc..) As for UC Santa Cruz, I don't know anything about it. I have, however, visited USC with an interest for their game development programs and was very impressed. Still, aim for MIT. Oh, and just some advice from a programmer and current computer science student: don't expect to learn programming from school. It's something you learn on your own out of your own interest. No, seriously, you won't learn anything from a school.

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Hmm, I'm left thinking that Video Game Design is pretty meaningless because all the design is done by someone who has the skills to create. It's a well known fact that the guys who design map layouts etc. got there by mapping themselves. But hey, I'm not too knowledgable here

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Posted by Judo It's impossible for anyone to be knowledgeable about this. Game development degrees popped up recently. Sure, you can claim game "design" has been around a while, but those are actually design classes. Design is useless without the skill to actually create. Anywho, judging by the course names, you'll learn what you need to know and being a UC, it's going to have good computer science courses. (UC Berkley basically created, well, everything. TCP, IP, BSD, etc..) As for UC Santa Cruz, I don't know anything about it. I have, however, visited USC with an interest for their game development programs and was very impressed. Still, aim for MIT. Oh, and just some advice from a programmer and current computer science student: don't expect to learn programming from school. It's something you learn on your own out of your own interest. No, seriously, you won't learn anything from a school.
Good post despite your lack of knowledge about this major. :D Anyways, if that's how it is, then I don't mind learning by myself. I just started learning C++, and it's pretty damn fun. Thanks for the advice. [I am, however, still wondering about what effect this would have on my career life, should I ever not make it in or decide not to pursue video gaming.]

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From what I've heard, the best schools with Video Game Development majors (at least on the east coast) are Rochester Institute of Technology in New York and Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. I'm at WPI currently for IMGD. What both of them do is they've been trying to get a variety of professors of practice who've been in the industry for at least 10 years and have a certain area of knowledge so they can teach the general classes and something that they specialize in. The professor I had last term worked on the storyline behind Titan's Quest, so he teaches the story writing class. I'm not sure how RIT does it, but WPI splits it up into IMGD-Art and IMGD-Tech. IMGD-Tech is more of a Computer Science with focus in game design major and IMGD-Art is pretty much digital art with focus in application to games (ie 3D modeling, story writing, texturing, etc.). The point of a game design major is not to get the practice so you can jump right into it because right from the start they tell you that when you graduate most of what you learned Freshman year is outdated. It's more of a figurative diving board into the industry since some knowledge is better than none and you'll be picked up by game developers like EA games right out of college. Speaking of which, after college, what you'll end up doing is either get hired by EA games, work there for a couple years for shit pay, then get hired by a better company for a much more reasonable wage. OR you will leave college with about 3-5 friends, start an indie game company, sell a few games on STEAM or something, expand, then up your budget, repeat this until you get picked up by a larger company. The Game Industry is much different from others. In ways it's both Entertainment and software programming. As for your question, eh, it is a state college, so I doubt it would be all that good. I applied to Champlain College for their game development program, but I went with WPI because of their stronger background and Champlain is a liberal arts school. Game development is something better handled by tech schools I find. EDIT: Yeah, from the looks of that PDF, they only have 4 game design classes and they're general game development. They should have more area related classes like Machinima, Story Writing, AI programming, digital painting, etc.

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Learn some real skills like game content creation. be an artist.

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