Hi again
I was wondering the other day what are the best games developer courses on offer in Australia and what is the basic curriculum. I ask this because I have recently red a paper on the state of the games industry and noted that employers are grizzling that students don't meet the basic skills level. They might be ok in the creativity department but apparently lack what employers are looking for in the work flow management and priority recognition areas. It would seem to me you'd learn these skills doing the job in an apprentice - mentor type role rather than in a Uni or TAFE.
Yeah I know of this thread.
I just want to hear more of the examples you included in your reply.
Having done a Masters and been a lecturer at Uni I understand the process of self directed learning quite well.
I think its all very good to a degree but it isn't real world ( Profit margins economy of scale etc.) I have worked for a few games and multimedia developers and found the issues with workflow and autonomy a real burden when it came to getting small tasks finished on time. I also noted that creativity in all areas was stifled by the dreaded deadline. So I was asking if any students out there are given any guidelines when it comes to organizing there own workflow. Not strictly speaking ( Spreadsheets etc ).
When I was at Qantm we did have a few classes on time management, setting mile stones, how to lay it all out, how the timeframe of asset production needed to work and what to do if something goes wrong.
I think that a lot of the time this stuff just never gets done because most of us want to get on to the business of making stuff. This is why I am an advocate of there being a dedicated project manager who knows what they are doing, what is reasonable and how to deal with people when they are not pulling their weight, in short having true managerial and interpersonal skill.
Note: When I was at Qantm the course was made up of 3 parts, basicly Code / Art / Project Management.
Pantmogner
I'm a student at qut... the amount of game related stuff available there in their IT soft eng major is near nonexistant.
However there is a new subject i'm doing (we're ginuea pigs!! yay!!) which is like the quantm course... compressed into one subject. It be awsome... but only runs for 6 months
however if you're tricky, you can do a project of your own choice... i tried to make a game
as one... got good marks, but it's nothing great.
Check out this thread on game dev courses in Australia:
[url]http://www.sumea.com.au/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=652[/url]
"but apparently lack what employers are looking for in the work flow management and priority recognition areas".
That situation is probably the same with any occupation, not just game dev. IMO, its really something you can't directly teach in a course but could probably get as a side effect.
Example, I'm currently doing an advanced software engineering project in a team of 14 people. Basically, we have a client which the uni found for us, and we spend the whole year building a piece of software. There's no real guidance, we are left on our own to decide on how we will go about elliciting requirements, what SE model to follow etc. We're basically on our own. Put in a situation like that, I think i've learnt a lot about what happens in real life and have hopefully gained skills which employers are looking for (hopefully :| ), but I know people who have gotten through such projects as well who really didn't get much out of it, and just complained that there was too much work, no help etc. So really, what skills you get from a course is in some way reliant on what you put in.
Hope i'm making some sort of sense...