Be me

>Be me
>going to uni for game design, really want to make a good Veeky Forums one day
>make easy friends with others in course through similar interest like games, anime, pot ect
>Very obvious "that guy" in ALL of my classes
>Never shuts up, always questioning every word the teacher says, can be smelled from across the room
>fat neck beard myself so never say anything
>today he goes off on a sub and his group for finally asking him to quiet down and not be so bossy
>refuses to leave the room and keeps yelling
>one minuet left in class so the sub just lets us all leave

Are these people everywhere in game design? Is this my punishment for chasing what I'm passionate about?

That guy and game design horror stories thread

>going to uni for game design

You fucked up. You fell for a trap that will cost you tens and thousands of whatever currency your nation uses. You've been scammed and you'll come out the other end with a useless qualification that will never help you get a job anywhere. In any game developer's eyes, experience is a million times more important than any sort of trash qualification like this.

It shouldn't surprise you that genuinely unpleasant idiots fell for the same trap that you did.

You are a negative nancy.

I have a couple projects under my belt already, and the school's helped with a few of them

>go upvote One Run Dungeon on steam green light please and thanks

It's pretty nice and at an actual "respectable university" not like Full Sail or some shit

He's right though. Getting a degree in game design is a highly questionable use of your opportunity to study.

How was Medieval Civ yesterday morning, user?

Wa m8?

>really want to make a good Veeky Forums one day
probably not today, from the looks of the catalog, today is Free Helmet And Crayons day

Oh, you're not who I thought then. See you at the meeting tonight.

>going to uni for game design

>going to uni for game design
Two ristretto please

At least I don't have a Liberal Arts Degree

Not anywhere outside of the US it won't.

Barely better

There's literally no difference in how much they're worth. It's the same value for the piece of paper.

That Guy usually won't make it far in education. Once you make it out of entry-level classes, That Guy will have either got his shit together, or flunked out.

See you there stranger
How else does someone make it? Not everyone can write up d&d in their spare time, and plenty of people want more games so why not have a degree that helps people make games? Traps like full sail do take advantage of people but I go to IU so why wouldn't they try to make an actual game program if theirs a need for it?
Thank you, that makes me feel way better going forward.

>Game Design Major

OP, you know you can just take Game Design courses while pursuing a useful degree, right?

I want to make games too but I did a little research and found out that the industry fucking sucks and the degree is worthless.

>>one minuet left in class so the sub just lets us all leave
Why were you in a music class?

Not saying you're totally wasting your time or that you won't learn anything useful, but its important to remember post secondary education is a business. Often a business first. Offering programs, classes and paying professors for things that won't make money is becoming less and less viable. They're not offering the program because there is a need for it, they're offering the program because they need money and people will pay to take it.

>going to uni for game design
Holy shit, that's an actual thing? I thought Full Sail was just a Stillbirth.

It is, or at least it should be.
It goes both way in a supply and demand kind of way. The teachers here have tons of experience in the business (I have subs in classes cause they all went to GDC) and administration are open to adding new classes for the large income of students and they even host events for the on campus game design club (which is where I made One Run Dungeon mentioned earlier). Why shouldn't someone go the traditional college route for game design now that people are starting to actually give a fuck?

How is game design not a Liberal Arts Degree?

Do you actually have to take Calc 2?

WHY?

My honest advice is that you should double major. Its great to follow your dream, but its also nice to have a backup plan.

Find another major that has some real-world career opportunity you would enjoy/can live with. The great thing is, this and your Game Design major WILL help each other. There is almost nothing you can pick for your other major that won't be a good influence on your game design, and having a Game Design degree on your resume when applying for your first job in whatever else will give you something that helps you stand out from the crowd.

I did something similar, in that I majored in both Creative Writing and Computer Science. I love to write, but I knew it was a long shot that I would be able to support myself with my writing, so computers as well. And that helped me land the job I have been enjoying for the past 5 years, because Computer Science is a problem solving field and showing that I had something to bring to the table beyond just a basic understanding of syntax meant that I could think outside the box instead of just googling code snippets and following the book.

Don't take this as a put down or anything. I sincerely hope that you get to live out your dream of being a game designer full time. But as a game designer, I'm sure you understand the value of having multiple win conditions.

That's kinda built into the program, cause in the third year you only take on required class. So What other majors would you suggest?

I can't answer that for you, sadly. I don't know you, or your college. But something you that you would consider reliably employable.

>Double majoring

God I wish I could have double majored. Unfortunately my uni (Britfag) didn't allow double majors between my course and anything actually useful, been 2 years since I graduated with a MSci Software Engineering and my dual honours options were Ancient Icelandic, Ancient Latin and Health and Safety.

I chose Health and Safety, I chose poorly.

Jesus Christ you did.

Ancient Latin is a money press. Ancient Icelandic might be too now that Gaiman is writing Norse Mythos stories.

What do you like to do besides game design? Do you enjoy data science? (Accounting or, I guess, Data Science) Budgetary analysis? (Accounting or, I guess, Data Science) Managing? (Business Administration) Being an asshole? (MBA)

Figure out what part of cubicle hell doesn't make you want to noose up the most and pick a major related to that. That's what you'll do for the rest of your life.

Meanwhile here I am heading back to film school because fuck it, fetching coffee at 40 is a career now.

I'm sitting here now, doing me final semester in Game Design and Development, wondering if I made the right choice. Does it help that it's for video games, or that it explicitly focuses on being versatile enough that we should be able to be employed in any general computing/programming job?

What's your course like, OP? What classes do you have?

>tfw double master in material sciences and nanoscale engineering
feels pretty good

Right now I have a design class, one that teaches different art and sound programs like reason and Photoshop, and a game coding class that teaches WADE and Construct 2

>WADE and Construct 2

The fuck are they? I learned C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, HTML, MySQL, and loads of other shit. And what the fuck is "reason" anyways?

less, actually. A liberal arts degree at least exposes you to variety of disciplines and ideas, and how to present your own ideas.

If you're choosing between two hires for dev work, one has uni experience programing in an entirely obsolete language and "really likes video games" and one has 16 credit hours each of history, psychology, and literature, and knows how to use his words to interact with people, the second hire is much, much more desirable.

I'd rather teach someone our coding language than how to interact with humans or come up with a new idea themselves.

Reason is a music software, construct 2 is basically a drag and drop game maker, and WADE uses java

Oh right, then. Do you do write code, or is that in a later semester in the course?

I doubt he actually has to code if it's drag and drop.

Except if it's a GUI like Ansys. Better coding than dealing with that.

>spending money and four years for a qualification that your chosen career field doesn't require
The "everyone should go to college" meme needs to fucking die

Yes in WADE no in Construct
a prereq was informatics which was basically learning a language a week. Html, c++, python, ect

>In any game developer's eyes, experience is a million times more important than any sort of trash qualification like this.

You seem to be under the delusional impression that game design courses isn't literally 50% just making shit to put in a portfolio, i.e. "Experience"

Unless by "experience" you mean actual work at a studio, because you're better off trying to catch a fucking leprechaun than chasing work at a game studio with no qualifications what-so-ever.

What you said was pretty accurate 5 years ago, but almost every place offering game design courses have wised up to what game studios actually look for in new hires.

He's right though, he really is.

All you're doing is paying 30k for 5 years of networking and a piece of paper.

Your time would be better spent living at home, working a part time job (nothing too stressful) and practicing your craft.

If you want to do anything productive: take a 2 year or something course in computer science or programming.

Software guy here, don't go into game design. Every friend I know who went into it is working retail or military as a grunt. Pick basically any other field with jobs in it and do that instead. You don't need a degree to make games.

>Electrical Engineering and Economics
I just want ISOs to give me more data.
Selfish fuckers.

I'm sorry but I don't know that feel.

All I hope for now is nuclear armageddon.

A pretty disgusting % of employers will throw out applications from people without *a* degree, doesn't matter what.
It's not very accurate screening (throws out some good people), but it's EXTREMELY efficient screening (takes almost no effort, throws out the majority of the worse people).

I don't know if you've ever looked at college dropout rates, but an astonishing number of people don't have the work ethic (or drive) to finish getting a piece of paper.

>nanoscale engineering
get a load of this faggot
everyone knows the future is MACROscale. We're all just going to embiggen and use cell phones the size of houses.

>>going to uni for game design

Be sure to take that Fry-O-Lator Operations course as an elective, fuckwit.

Start watching a lot of gay porn too. It will give you some pointers when you start sucking cock for rent money.

If it's a computer science sub-major you should honestly be fine desu
Computer skills are extremely marketable

green is an ugly color for you user har har

Just do what I did. Refinance everything, get some loans, and just return to school.

You CAN do it. Just STOP MASTURBATING. t. Jesus

>You fell for the Fullsail Meme

Fuck you, 20 year old me. You fucking dumbass.

I fundamentally disagree. The autistic neckbeard is far more likely to be good at coding and eventually reach higher profession: coding levels. The normie will too, but at a much slower rate.

This means that the autist will ALWAYS be more confident in his coding skill than the normie would in his. So when the autist has this amazing idea for a novel gameplay mechanic he can make it work, and will be pushed to make it work by his autism. The normie might never even come up with this due to their lesser knowledge of coding and how to make gameplay mechanics interact, and even if they do they might just dismiss it as too hard to do.

The autist will make better games. The normie will make you EA.

Hire the liberal arts major to design and write the game. Hire the neckbeard to code it. You don't let a fucking drywall hanger design your house. That's why we have architects.

Yeah, getting an education is a waste of time and money! Just ask any of the millionaires posting here!

>paying for your degree
Wew. What kind of dystopia is that?

It's called not Germany

More like not-Northern Europa

>One Run Dungeon
Looks alright. Music is baller.

>Suggestions
Add more variety.
Perhaps co-op?

I took a few Game Design-related courses in community college. Was a CS major, but I had an artistic bent and was pretty good at animation in terms of both getting it to look right and knowing what it needed to look right (started young, I still have an installation of Macromedia Flash). As an extension from the more cinematically-oriented animation courses, I also took a few rigging-and-game-animation courses, which let me rub shoulders with some game design students.

Excluding the handful of Animation majors, they were mostly the same. Primarily big, chubby neckbeards, with a few noneck normies, scrawny Asians and one or two genuinely attractive girls /guys. Surprisingly, they weren't insufferable Idea Guys, mostly because by the time the GameDev program had you doing model work they'd either reformed those assholes or filtered them out. They weren't all Grade-A socialites, but I was happy chatting with any of them.

Except this one guy. He was my first brush with genuine autism, or at least severe social maladaption (not the closest, though - I'd get that later when I temporarily joined a group therapy for what I'm pretty sure were aspies, despite not being one). He was strongly opinionated, often spoke too loudly, and had a tendency to kill the room's conversation after every comment he made. When the instructor began to avoid calling on him (out of either annoyance or pity), you could literally seethis guy vibrating in his chair at being unable to chime in, until he'd eventually give in and start interrupting. His voice is the one I have forevermore come to associate with the word "ackshually."

>going to uni for game design
The real university for game design? Playing games 15 hours per week and knowing what works and what doesn't. This hobby was shaped and by people without any education in designing games, and instead educated in real world topics that can be applied to games.

You're better off majoring in history, anthropology, geography, linguistics, or architecture if you want to make a good Veeky Forums related project some day.

Please enlighten us on how Ancient Latin is a money press.

Yeah, but you still need code monkeys for bigger projects.

It's valuable if you're into either law or medicine. Neither of which have much do do with game designing.

>tfw you'll never get a degree from a university outside Earth

Write, maybe yeah. Design, no. Here's the design process for a normie.

"would this level work better if I added a slow mo quick time event? no? should I do it anyway? fuck yes!"

Here's the design process for a neckbeard.

"So at this point the player should be about this strong and against this miniboss he has a 55% chance of success on average, hmm that's too low but I don't want to just buff the enemy health bar, what can I ooooooooooo ."

But hey man it all depends what you're going for, if you just want to turn a diabolical amount of profit then sure hire normies and go full EA, good luck to you. You won't have a legacy or fanbase, but you'll do quite well.

If you decided to go full rockstar however you could be revered as innovators and industry leaders for decades. I assume rockstar is full of neckbeards, I recently played gta 5 for the first time and it was absolutely fucking brilliant with detail.

>Here's the design process for a normie.

>"would this level work better if I added a slow mo quick time event? no? should I do it anyway? fuck yes!"

That's not how it is and you know it.

I was being facetious but my point is a neckbeard would go out of his way to come up with a new and fun mechanic, not because he's smarter or studies hard, but because the drive to complete meaningless challenges to make different coloured lights appear in a different order on a computer screen is the only thing the neckbeard has in life. A normie says "oh I see this miniboss is really hard, well we've built it now so I don't want to scrap it, can we make it easier? well I don't want to pay overtime so you can rebalance this th- fine do that thing EA does where you have to press buttons in order. listen timmothy you have a real attitude problem, I think the call of duty people know how to make video games better than you, and they use QTE, so WE'RE using QTE."

If your potential neckbeard has a hobby, social life, gf or friends, he's not the person I'm talking about.

As someone who went into game design from graphic design. You won't pay your student debt with video games and with board games breaking even is the reasonable goal most of the time, profit is not even in the realm of possibility.

I didn't have student debt and I still would have never left the red zone if it wasn't for a couple $8-12k /gd/ gigs I lucked into. The games I've worked on/collaborated with didn't make me a dime. This is a vocation, not a job.

Last I checked medicine uses Greek.

>I assume rockstar is full of neckbeards
They aren't. If you go to GDC, you'll find out pretty quickly that the industry is dominated by people who look like normies. Neckbeards are very rare because it isn't conducive to networking, which is a requirement to really going anywhere in the industry. There are too many stories of people who made it big, but weren't good at networking and became the "new kid on the block," which results in a brief period of fame followed by obscurity as people see you're not consistent in your output.

Remember, about 2/3 of all job openings in the AAA game dev industry are never listed publicly and are filled via word-of-mouth. A recommendation from a trusted dev goes much farther than even having a blockbuster miracle of an indie title, because that makes you a much more knowable quantity.

>I don't know if you've ever looked at college dropout rates, but an astonishing number of people don't have the work ethic (or drive) to finish getting a piece of paper.
Or the money, you fucking idiot.

And this is why games suck nowadays. Just circlejerks of people veting other hacks like themselves and squeazing their insane opinions into everything.

It uses both.

Networking is good way to get feedback and you really can't make good game without that.

Thats bull shit. Some of the most popular games ever were 1 man ops with some freelance help at most.

There's a massive difference between networking and nepotism.
Gamergate happened because people forgot that.

None of which developed in vacuum (or if they were I've not heard of them). And for every such success there are dozens of great games done by small teams. Teamwork is just that much more powerful and it takes a literal genious to outperform several people.

>a massive difference
You're wrong; the difference is pretty small.
It's just very important.

britbong here, im currently doing an art and design course at my college, which i want to finish. Should i go to uni? I could double major, would make my CV/Resume look nicer

You seem to be under the impression that anyone who isn't a basement dwelling troglodyte doesn't have an ounce of creativity, passion, or drive. You are creating a fantasy world to prop up your idea nerd as the misunderstood genius held back by the legions of dim witted but inexplicably more successful 'normies'.

This isn't just wrong, its unhealthy because I'm sure you identify more strongly with your former example than with your latter one. You are setting yourself up for failure by preemptively dismissing the value and opinions of people with more social skills than you.

>15 hours per week
You are such a baby.

Man, this thread is harsh. OP is probably searching Amazon for pretied nooses at this very moment.

I'd like to hear some of what you are learning, OP, and then judge.

Medicine is a combination of Ancient Greek (not modern Greek) and Latin run through a blender and delivered by magic (an Ancient Greek root word).

Veeky Forums has a higher than normal ratio of anons who actually have jobs and careers than most boards, because our hobby is often an expensive one. That means people who have learned the life lessons that come from leaving college and having to make a living.

Most of whats in this thread is actually pretty encouraging, it just has realistic expectations. No one is telling him, after all, NOT to learn game design. Just not to plan on that game design being his meal ticket.

If I finish my film degree, I'll have a smorgasbord of ridiculous paperwork.

AAS Communications Application Technology
BS Psychology, MS Psychology
BS Film

I should do one of those mail-in MBAs from Dubai for good measure.

this is what I'm taking now I've taken an intro to design class where we played tg and did mini assingments talking about what they did right and wrong. Comparing things like monopoly and catan, ect,
The design class I'm in now splits everyone into teams of 4 and presents us with design challenges like how would you change cookie clicker into a table top game, or how would you add p&p rpg game elements to something like spades
I'm only a freshman but from what I'm told, the last two years is taken by esentially one class where everyone pitches a game, teams are split up between the best games, and you make that for two years
For an example of that, Spook House was a very popular one on campus and just made it to steam greenlight
For Comparison, One Run Dungeon had to be made in a semester

If you hire neckbeards to design your game you get Dwarf Fortress. Good luck trying to sell that to non-autists.

Except it's still a high saturation/low demand job market. Any position that isn't bitch boy is going to have like 100 applicants, most of whom will be better than you because they've spent the last 10 years being the bitch boy and hating their life and are desperately trying to claw their way out of that pit of despair where your life, dreams and aspirations are all worth slightly less than a half-decent cup of coffee.

t. somebody who worked in the industry for 6 years and had a mental breakdown

But what if I'm a stem major

It's not like other professions aren't exactly like this.
Even crime is oversaturated.

hm

>Are these people everywhere in game design?
Yes, it'd be stupid to assume otherwise. You think the anime club will be filled with guys in suits? Video games may be getting more normie but it's still niche enough to attract autists who want to learn to do the one thing they (think) they can do.

>Is this my punishment for chasing what I'm passionate about?
>>/agdg/
Just like what everyone else is saying, you don't learn good game design, you figure out how to use an engine and do the rest of game design stuff (Art, Music, etc) or find people who can do that for you. Shit like that costs 0$ so long as you have google

>Learning
The best part of a business degree is that you meet people who will throw money at you to be their slave because they know you can't do anything better with a business degree

Solid advice frindo.
Been dicking through an aa in accounting for years. But comp sci and creative weighting sound like a fun skill set.
That noose won't get me without a fight and a nice pile of student debt buys allot of time.

i went to uni for games design
realized the people i would have to deal with and immediately swapped to IT. seriously the games design people contained the biggest void of self awareness I'd ever seen.

Care to give an example?

user, if you do go through the design degree course, you need to either focus on artsy 3d and animation shit, or programming. Entering the industry as a designer is night impossible. And in my own experience, if you want to go through programming, compsci is just better.

So yeah, if you do, double major, but bear in mind your degree will be worth jackshit: What will be worth something is your portfolio.

I'm not saying no one drops out over finances, but it's a very small fraction.
Most people without the money don't go at all.

Ah! Plenty of people drop out when their low grades cut off financial aid, but that's essentially an extension of
>an astonishing number of people don't have the work ethic (or drive) to finish getting a piece of paper.

It's not really the place to discuss this but you aren't that wrong actually .

>You fucked up. You fell for a trap that will cost you tens and thousands of whatever currency your nation uses.

>study only normie things that are only job related
>all education everywhere is paid

You're a boring person user.