Looking for advice or suggestions. Here's the scoop...
I've always wanted a career involving creating toys or games. I think it started and when I played with Lego and grew as I built tree houses, tinkered with bikes, orchestrated mass-scale action figures wars, made RPG characters or DMed campaigns, played & traded MtG, and played plenty of video games. Having recently discovered that I enjoy writing code, the idea of game development is very exciting. Admittedly, the Aurora toolset definately played a role in encouraging my initial interest.
A college here in Toronto, Canada offers a Video Game Design & Development program. I went there for an admissions interview yesterday and everything went very well. Seems like a pretty good school. I think I'd do great academically, but the tuition fee looks a bit beyond my current budget.
This past year I completed the first of a three year program, Computer Programmer / Analyst, at another college. It's a bit wider of a programming base, but far less focus on any kind of artistic/graphical design and nothing whatsoever on storytelling or animation. The courses focus on programming for business or e-commerce applications. I've been happy with learning programming fundamentals, but there's a lot of extra baggage that seems unnecessary, such as a compulsory gen-ed course that involves cursory overviews of world history, world religions & history, and art history. Nevertheless, the program is affordable with student loans.
Before that I've focused on studying things like graphic design, math, physics, martial arts, english, psychology, interpersonal communication/motivation/management, and behaviour science. Surprisingly, all of these really help with studying and writing code, even teaching the same to others using plain english. I also now use objected-oriented techniques when teaching math or english. All of these connections reinforced my enjoyment for programming, so I know I'm on the right track.
Back to the point, I've been thinking about switching schools to get more experience with specifically game development. I'd have to work part-time while taking full-time classes, which I've seen lead to intense burnout and academic failure. It might be helpful in some ways, but I'm not sure if I need to make this kind of change if I want to work in the game industry.
I find outside perspectives to be very helpful, so any suggestions/comments would be greatly appreciated.
