How did you get into the gaming industry?

[theslug]

Your Aunt was a nice woman. I've believe I've passed through fresno a few times as a young child. Pretty much anything that's in between Vegas/California/New Mexico but not exactly near any respected city are all down trodden places where people have had their spirits broken and their dreams shattered. It's truly a shame, I'm glad you made it out.

[Leferd]

Not intending any disrespect, but places in California like Fresno, Bakersfield, Merced, and Modesto strike me as prototypical minor league baseball towns. They ain't exactly small towns, but really, there isn't much to do over in those places.

[Alvin Nelson]

Not intending any disrespect, but places in California like Fresno, Bakersfield, Merced, and Modesto strike me as prototypical minor league baseball towns. They ain't exactly small towns, but really, there isn't much to do over in those places.

 

You are exactly right.

[Moatilliatta]

Thanks for sharing your story with us Alvin. This is an awesome thread.

[Humodour]

Thanks for sharing your story with us Alvin. This is an awesome thread.

 

It certainly is. Gives a human face to the people who make games.

[Joseph Bulock]

I'm going to have a boring story, because unlike a lot of the folks here, I didn't really have any interesting detours. I've been working towards a games job since I was in high school, which isn't much of a story.

 

I was lucky enough to get an internship the summer I graduated high school at Maxon, who make a modeling and animation program called Cinema4d. I got my introduction to modeling and animation there, and then moved directly into programming in C++. I was lucky enough to have two incredibly talented programmers mentor me there, giving me a very solid introduction to programming and scripting.

 

That fall, I started college as an Information and Computer Science Major. First year went well enough, the intro classes were never very challenging, and the intro level programming was essential a mix between solving logic puzzles (which I love) and searching for missing semicolons (which no one loves). Fast forward to the summer, I got my first QA position with THQ. I was one of the most prolific testers that summer, and even got tester of the week (which apparently hadn't been given out for over a year). While it sounds really minor now, I was incredibly proud of myself, and was very excited that I might be working to a real spot in the games industry. I'd even got to speak to a real developer over the phone, which was another big deal at the time.

 

My second year of programming started to give me some more problems. The classes that were about programming were still a lot of fun, but my second year had me delve into the terrifying art of documentation. I started having night mares about writing printer software for the rest of my life. Multiple whole pots of coffee were consumed every night as I tried to convince myself that I could imagine a life where I wrote documentation for accessor functions. The documentation class for me came down to the final. To pass, I needed a B-. I got the final back and I was a point below the cut-off. The professor was usually fair about partial credit for close answers, so I went to him and asked him for the one point of partial credit for a question that I'd answered incorrectly, but only due to some poor math on the last half of the question. I explained that this would be all I would need to pass the class. He refused to pass me, and that was the beginning of the end of my formal programming education.

 

I finished off the year as an CS major, failing the documentation class one more time, having attended maybe four of the actual lectures. The teacher was even less engaging and by now the printer software nightmares were getting very frequent (I really wish I was joking on this). I was actually waking up in cold sweats from the worst of them. The fear of a mundane existence as a software engineer, separated from the industry that I'd always wanted to be a part of became too much, and when I started school in the fall, I was a film and interactive media major.

 

The next two years flew by. I studied horror, Hong Kong action, pornography, Japanese samurai slashers along with the classics of Hollywood and major cinemas around the world, and a few times, even got to bring video games into the conversations. I loved my film education and was very happy when I finally got to make my short films. I was the atypical director, caring almost nothing about the shots, letting my friend who really loved cameras and shot list take care of that while I handled the choreography and the editing. I lost whole weeks in the editing studio, watching other students finish whole projects in the time I'd take on a two minute scene. I graduated one class short of a programming minor and with more editing experience than some of the grad students, very nervous that I'd get a real game job any time soon.

 

I did manage to snag another testing job at a publisher and started the Monday after my last final. Atlus is a small publisher that handles lots of smaller niche games from Japan. It was a fun job, but was still very much a testing job, and I was back to having next to no contact with developers. Luckily for me I spotted a QA opening at Obsidian and after only five weeks at Atlus, I left to become the third production tester, following Nathanial and Patrick.

 

After NWN2 wrapped up I turned in a design test and amazingly got promoted. From there on in, I've been a junior designer on Alpha Protocol, and have now settled in as the cinematic designer. It's a great time getting to use my film background while working on games, and I'm still shocked that everything has worked out so smoothly.

 

Ok, so I wrote a small novel. Uhg. The moral of this overly long story is that printer software is terrifying.

 

The End.

[Jorian Drake]

.... Thorned Iron Text Wall of Great Importance +4

 

 

 

 

 

...

[Jean-Eric Khalife]

My story is a bit similar to Joseph's story. I've always wanted a job in the industry, but I never knew what I wanted to do. I took some C++ classes in high school and I really enjoyed them, so I decided to become a CS major in college. I had the professor from hell in my first class. He was bulgarian, so he talked like the terminator and he had a hearing problem, so communication was very difficult. I already knew most of the basic programming techniques so the class was a breeze, but other students were having a lot of trouble. He would make us write out our programs on paper during the test. No compiling, no checking for errors, none of that. So I lost half the points on missing semi-colons and accidentally putting commas in the wrong places. Simple syntax errors that a compiler would have picked out in a second. After that class I never wanted to take another class with that professor, so I started to explore other majors.

 

After a year and a half of taking G.E. classes, I was clueless, so I started doing web design and I enjoyed it. I worked with an artist friend of mine, I did the html/css and he did the art. I ended up learning Flash in the process and Illustrator. I started to really get into graphic design and with no experience I landed an internship at my school. They taught me everything I knew about art and I realized that I had a creative side. I figured I would rather have a bachelors in science, so I continued to learn computer science while building my art portfolio in hopes of landing a job.

 

I ended up taking a class in game development at my school and our goal was to make a game that would be judged by different companies on the final day of the class. Obsidian was on the panel as well as Blizzard, Google, Red 5 and others. Kevin Saunders had emailed my professor about people who might be interested in an internship at Obsidian. I jumped all over that, but it was an unpaid internship. I applied and showed them my programming resume and my art portfolio and they decided they wanted me as a UI artist, so that's what I did on NX1. I was working unpaid at obsidian while holding two other jobs and going to school full time, but it was worth it and I ended up getting hired as a paid intern and then a junior artist.

 

I was hired on as the 2D guy, but since working here I've been taught two different 3D packages and two different editors. I've really been able to take advantage of how much knowledge and talent the people on the teams have.

 

 

My advice to people interested would be to do whatever it takes if you really want to get into the industry. Look for smaller companies and apply, even if there's no position listed. Use the machine gun approach and send your stuff out to everyone you can and don't be afraid to take on an unpaid internship.

 

For you art kids out there, modding is a great way to build your portfolio and your art will look right if you actually place it in a mod and see what it looks like. Try to get your portfolio to have fantasy, sci-fi and real world art in it, this is one of the best recommendations I've heard is to show of your skills effectively. Of course, feel free to ask us if you do have any questions, we're more than happy to help

[Jorian Drake]

art? i wanna see your works!

 

 

NOW ("force-persuation")

[Scorpion1813]

Of course, feel free to ask us if you do have any questions, we're more than happy to help

I have questions. See page 2 of this topic.

[Francisco Rivas]

This turned out to be longer than I thought...

 

My first exposure to a video game on a PC was outside of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and Oregon Trail was the shareware version of Wolfenstein 3D. A friend of mine gave me a floppy disk with a post-it note on it that talked about this fancy thing called "pkunzip" I thought "Wow, if by following these instructions, I can play this cool game, what if I follow better instructions? I could play better games!" So I started learning DOS and how to run a lot of different types of games back when you needed to have as much of that oh so elusive 640k of lower memory available or else your DOS game wouldn't run.

 

I went to college at the University of Central Florida and studied Computer Science. I really wanted to learn 3D graphics but at the time there was only one class at the undergrad level that had anything to do with graphics. It was a basic introduction to virtual worlds and for the final project, I taught myself 2D DirectDraw. I wanted to learn more graphics so I convinced one of my professors to let me do an Independent Study in 3D graphics to finish my Bachelor's. That's where I taught myself D3D7 and made a very simple terrain demo with an airplane flying around. By this time, I knew I wanted to learn more about 3D graphics but I also knew I had a long way to go. I had decided that one way or another I was going to learn 3D graphics so I figured I might as well get a degree for it. So I enrolled in the Master's program at UCF since the graduate program had many more options when it came to 3D graphics.

 

Because the Independent Study showed I was willing to go out of my way to learn something that interested me, I got an internship at Evans & Sutherland in Salt Lake City, UT the summer before I started grad school. They did hardware and software for flight simulators. I worked in their 3D graphics software group. This got me valuable experience that I would use later.

 

While working on my Master's, I got a job at the local ATI office as an intern for a full year. I worked part time doing research in real-time image processing. I think what set me apart from other applicants was how I aquired my graphics knowledge (mainly by learning it on my own). My Master's Thesis was on hardware-based radiosity and ray tracing. During this time, I became a DirectX MVP, which is basically a person recognized by Microsoft as an expert in the particular technology and someone willing to share their knowledge with others. Upon graduation, I went to work for EA and eventually ended up at Microsoft on the DirectX team. I had been working on some unique rendering techniques I read about in research papers and put together a demo that showed everything off. This seems to be what helped me get in at Microsoft.

 

I decided that I wanted to get back into making games directly, but not at an extremely large publisher, so here I am at Obsidian. I can say that I never want to go back to a large company again. Mid-sized companies fit me extremely well; you don't have the stress of a startup that never knows if their next pay check will clear, and you don't have the frustration of 7 layers of corporate management who haven't done any real work in over a decade.

 

My advice for getting into the game industry:

1. Pick an area that you truly enjoy working in - It sucks to wake up every morning to go to a job you hate no matter what the paycheck is.

2. Get as much experience in that area as possible, be it through education, internships, hobby projects, or modding.

3. Do something to separate yourself from the competition - build an engine, write demos, put together a portfolio.

4. Be willing to learn and keep up with advancements in your field be it through conferences, trade publications, or hobby projects you do on your own time.

5. When you go to an interview, don't be arrogant - It's ok to answer "I don't know" to a question instead of trying to pull something out of your butt.

[rainwarrior]

I got hired at the start of last year by Obsidian. Here's a rundown of my games programming career prior to getting the job:

 

 

0. At age 4 my family got an Atari ST, beginning my lifelong interest in video games.

 

1. I started learning BASIC pretty young, maybe 6 or 7 years old. It started when I found some kid-oriented BASIC programming books in my school's library. (There was a series, I think by Usborne, with cartoon monsters and stuff; I don't know if they're still around, but they were awesome.) When I brought it home, my dad found a disk that came with the computer that had ST BASIC on it, and I went to work. I learned by copying listings out of books and magazines, and playing around with them.

 

1. During my elementary school years I wrote 20 or so very simple games (stuff like text adventures, bowling, space invaders, etc...) on my Atari ST (in ST BASIC and the compilable GFA BASIC), and later a 286 IBM compatible in QBASIC.

 

2. At some point I came across the Squaresoft RPGs (FFIV, Secret of Mana, FFVI, etc.) and was inspired to want to make an RPG myself. I started trying to make a square-tile engine for an RPG in QBASIC. (This is around grade 8 or so).

 

3. A year or so later I discovered that there was no way to do a masked blit in QBASIC with any kind of speed, which seemed pretty important. I tried moving up to Visual Basic, but I couldn't figure out how to do sprite/tile graphics there either (I tried various things, like putting my sprites in image boxes and moving them around frame by frame, which didn't work too well). At that point I picked up a "learn C++ in 12 easy steps" book, and downloaded DJGPP.

 

4. From various tutorials I could find on the internet I learned about Mode 13h VGA programming, keyboard interrupts, and other things relevant to game programming, and put together a few simple VGA games (starting with pong), and even some very simple 3D graphics (i.e. points, lines and spheres) based on what I'd learned in high school algebra.

 

5. Once I had some of the basics down I went back to making an RPG engine, this time with 3/4 perspective tiles (i.e. Super Mario RPG style). Around the same time I discovered a freeware RPG engine effort called Verge, and became a part of that community. I made a character editor tool for Verge (which doubled as the character editor for my own engine). I worked on this project on and off for a long while, had made a working map editor, and had even learned enough assembly to rewrite all of the tile blitting code in pure assembly.

 

6. Eventually that project was abandoned, and when I finished high school I took a detour by going to university for music. While doing this I put my elective credits into a computer science degree. When I finished my music degree, I stayed on to finish a computer science degree as well. During this time I took a course in computer graphics and was really hooked. I put a whole lot of time into that course, and learned a ton. I also joined the competitive programming team (we competed in the ACM ICPC), and there I learned a lot about algorithms, coding on a team and under a deadline, and got a lot of good coding experience.

 

7. After graduating, I was looking for a job for about six months. During this time I tried to learn everything I could about graphics that I didn't know yet. I wrote simple raytracers, and many 3D graphics programs, put together some demo stuff I could use with my resume, and I started putting out applications everywhere I could. I probably sent out a few hundred resumes. I didn't get any responses for the first while, though over time having more and more to show in terms of demos I think, eventually I was getting to about one phone interview per week in response to the resumes I was sending out. Obsidian was about the 10th interview I had, I think.

 

 

So, that's how I got into the industry. Lots and lots of practice over the years, and then lots and lots of resumes when I got out of university. I think having a demo or something to show really helps. Something I didn't realize while I was looking for a job; a lot of times not getting called back is more about what the company needs at the moment than the quality of your application. There were times where I felt that maybe I wasn't valuable enough to get the job I wanted, because I got no response at the time, but many times since I have been hired I have gotten calls and e-mails out of the blue, places wanting to interview me based on the resume I'd send them 6, 10, 15 months prior. Timing for the company is a huge deal, and you can't predict that.

 

My advice, if you want to get into the industry, is to make stuff. Make little games. Make mods. Make graphics demos. Learn as much as you can, and if you read about something make sure to try it out. Write lots of simple programs; figure out the minimal workings of a game engine. Get experience working on a team by getting your friends involved.

[Gorth]

...the terrifying art of documentation.

A universal truth

 

1. Pick an area that you truly enjoy working in - It sucks to wake up every morning to go to a job you hate no matter what the paycheck is.

2. Get as much experience in that area as possible, be it through education, internships, hobby projects, or modding.

3. Do something to separate yourself from the competition - build an engine, write demos, put together a portfolio.

4. Be willing to learn and keep up with advancements in your field be it through conferences, trade publications, or hobby projects you do on your own time.

5. When you go to an interview, don't be arrogant - It's ok to answer "I don't know" to a question instead of trying to pull something out of your butt.

It sounds so simple, but it can be so hard to do. It should be part of some "constitution" for making it in the IT industry

[@\NightandtheShape/@]

I'm not sure if I could really say that I fit into this thread, but as someone coming straight out of University who has had a little industry experience and is currently looking for a job it may interest some folks who are, how can it be put, younger and curious.

 

I started programming when I was 6 on the Amstrad CPC 464, this was the start of what became a lifelong passion for games, both from a development perspective, and a gaming perspective. I never did anything more fantastical than copy programs from an old teach yourself BASIC manual, but for loops and goto's etc... Kinda made sense to my childish mind.

 

When I was about 10 I got hold of an Amiga 600, and a copy of something called S.E.U.C.K., Shoot 'em Up Construction Kit, which was my first experience of something akin to a game engine which allowed users to generate assets for use in the engine, and place togeather a simple shooter, I built a couple of games using this and began to grasp coding concepts such as tile set engines and sprites etc... Later I moved onto using AMOS BASIC, where I actually started programming again from the age of about 11 to 14 I did nothing more than teach myself how to program, writing a bunch of small games using the language which was actually fairly powerful. I mostly wrote simple shooters, and a beat 'em up. Then Commadore went bust, so I played around with QBASIC, but I never did write any games with it, frankly it wasn't really a language suited to developing anything graphical. I tried to learn C, and assembler, but at the time I didn't quite get it. And so I assumed that I was absolutely stupid, and incapible.

 

So it was that I actually stopped programming, I started to indulge a passion for music, I set up a band and played a whole bunch of gigs before finally realising that while I love music, doing it for a living meant a total comprimise towards commercial music if I was ever going to actually feed myself, I floated around and did a bunch of travelling and generally questioned myself for years.

 

I eventually found myself at the age of 20, engaged, and with very little hope of a happy future... The only thing I ever remembered enjoying as much as making a noise, was programming, I had started to toy around again with BASIC languages on the PC, playing with DarkBASIC, learning fundemental 3D concepts. So I looked towards what I could do, what options were available to me.

 

The local College did something called an "Access course", which was a 21's and over course which basically meant I could get into University and avoid taking a bunch of A Level's so I figured what the hell, I should just give it a shot. So I did, and ended up learning PASCAL, the fundementals Assembly language and blitz the course, then I moved onto doing a (Bsc)Hon's in "Computer Games Programming", at Huddersfield University.

 

I did a whole bunch of stuff at University, being a game's programming course naturally the focus was on game's programming principles and the obvious computer science stuff, the first year was a typical introduction to programming, I got my mind round Java and Object Orientated Programming, consider I'd never dealt with object up until then, it was a slow and bizzare transition, I'd always written sequencial code. With the first year out of the way, the second year was when things finally got interesting, and I started to really understand what was happening.

 

I learnt the basic's of C/C++ in a week, wrote my first DirectX 9 application in the first few months, along with my first particle engine. From that point onwards, I was sold on C++, I read everything I could related to it and direct X, and eventually attempted to write my own game engine, opposed to using a supplied game engine which was basically what everyone else did. By the end of the year I was the first person to learn and implement shaders, using HLSL which wasn't a huge feat really but considering that we wasn't supposed to cover it until our final year it was a pretty big thing for me, and granted me alot of kudos with my peer's.

 

Then I did a work placement at Canalside Studio's, a studio which was funded and setup by the University, but run by the students, it was the first year the project had been run, the studio had no contracts, a year's budget, no technology, just a room full of PC's and 8 programmers, no design staff, and no game idea's. I was assigned the role of lead programmer and assistant producer on one of the projects. All I can really say is that decision's were made to use C# and XNA to build our games, I was actually against this as XNA was in Beta, most people hadn't even touched C# (I had some generic experience with it). Management decided that was the route they wanted to take, students were invited to pitch game idea's etc..

 

I spotted the Dream Build Play competition and presented it to University management as being a good way of securing a contract for the studio, and considering we had three projects on the go all in XNA it seemed wise, they went for it, but not in the way I thought they would, they placed most of the resource's on one of the games and left me and another guy running on a very complicated concept doing all the grunt R&D work, as well as trying to produce something akin to a game. I worked 16 hour days, for month's, eventually providing alot of knowledge which was used by the other team for 3D animation and multi-threading, along with this we had a semi complete game that was lacking in art resource's that didn't hit the DBP deadline, the other project did, and ended up coming second and secured a contract for release on XBLA. So I trundled off solo to Seattle represented the studio, ran up a $400 phone bill and had a good time before going on to finish my degree.

 

The final year basically consisted of myself and some of the guys from Canalside working on a team project, which I produced, and wrote a majority of the game engine, gamescript and tools for, which eventually produced a prototype our groups game idea, called Solar Flux, which we're all still working, some of the guys are now working in industry. I also did my dissertation, which made use of L-Systems, DirectX 10 and Geometry shader's, where i managed to produce some nice performance statistics, along with a 132 page report.

 

Now that I've actually done all this work, I've been sending my CV/Resume to prospective employer's, and building my portfolio up read for my portfolio website. I've got my first interview for the new Codermasters studio in Guildford where they're working on some super secret project codenamed "Strike Team".

 

So that's me banging on the door to the games industry.

 

To Be Continued...

[kirottu]

*snip*

 

You forgot to tell us about ninjas, their sekrat schemes and your eternal battle against them.

[Scorpion1813]

A few of you have mentioned being trained up after getting a job in the industry. Is this something most developers do? So after my 3 years university course (which only really gives you 1-2 years of specialized training in your area of choice) I will obviously still have no real industry experience and most likely won't be specialized enough, since a lot of companies tend to hire people with experience and years of training in their field.

 

I guess I'm a little worried I'm not going to be good enough to get into the industry.

 

Also, is it easy enough to get promoted to different positions if you show enough interest and determination?

 

For more info on my course, I explained it in an earlier post, click here

[Jean-Eric Khalife]

A few of you have mentioned being trained up after getting a job in the industry. Is this something most developers do? So after my 3 years university course (which only really gives you 1-2 years of specialized training in your area of choice) I will obviously still have no real industry experience and most likely won't be specialized enough, since a lot of companies tend to hire people with experience and years of training in their field.

 

I guess I'm a little worried I'm not going to be good enough to get into the industry.

 

Also, is it easy enough to get promoted to different positions if you show enough interest and determination?

 

For more info on my course, I explained it in an earlier post, click here

 

 

While the course will help you learn about the industry and begin to train you, you can make yourself stand out even more by working on some mods. It's quite easy to find a team of people that just want to mod games and it will build your experience. Doing this will also help you stand out from the crowd. You can also be the head of a mod team to let your creative ideas out right away. You don't have to get paid to make a great game.

 

As for switching to other positions, it depends on the company. I've heard stories about people from Blizzard that spend 3 years making glass break correctly and that's all they do. Obsidian has been great at letting us switch positions if we show interest and talent, but not all companies are like that.

 

A combo of schooling and side projects are your best bet if you want to get into the industry, but you should do what you want to do. If you want to design a game, be a designer, annie's post gives some great tips for that, don't settle for being a character artist if that's not what you really want to do.

[Joseph Bulock]

*snip*

 

You forgot to tell us about ninjas, their sekrat schemes and your eternal battle against them.

 

How did you know about that? I thought I'd buried that time in my life...

[Jorian Drake]

*snip*

 

You forgot to tell us about ninjas, their sekrat schemes and your eternal battle against them.

 

How did you know about that? I thought I'd buried that time in my life...

hey joseph, didn't knew you're a pirate!

[Scorpion1813]

While the course will help you learn about the industry and begin to train you, you can make yourself stand out even more by working on some mods. It's quite easy to find a team of people that just want to mod games and it will build your experience. Doing this will also help you stand out from the crowd. You can also be the head of a mod team to let your creative ideas out right away. You don't have to get paid to make a great game.

 

As for switching to other positions, it depends on the company. I've heard stories about people from Blizzard that spend 3 years making glass break correctly and that's all they do. Obsidian has been great at letting us switch positions if we show interest and talent, but not all companies are like that.

 

A combo of schooling and side projects are your best bet if you want to get into the industry, but you should do what you want to do. If you want to design a game, be a designer, annie's post gives some great tips for that, don't settle for being a character artist if that's not what you really want to do.

 

Thanks for your reply and thanks to everyone at Obsidian for taking their time to post on here. It's very much appreciated and it really does help out people like myself who are interested in infiltrating the games industry.

[Alvin Nelson]

This turned out to be longer than I thought...

 

I thought "Wow, if by following these instructions, I can play this cool game, what if I follow better instructions? I could play better games!"

 

Wow, i NEVER would have thought of it that way. My thought would have been "how can we find a way to sell this and make some money for candy?"

 

Thanks for your reply and thanks to everyone at Obsidian for taking their time to post on here. It's very much appreciated and it really does help out people like myself who are interested in infiltrating the games industry.

 

NP! I sent it out to the company so that more peeps will write, so we shall see!

[Joshua A. Perez]

A few of you folks have asked for my website, to see works.

I will post it here instead of replying individually, since my mailbox is getting full.

 

 

www.scarletarmada.com

 

 

I should work on new personal stuff, its been about 2 months or so, but crafting aliens is a very time consuming experience.

 

Like Jean-Eric said, please do not hesitate to ask questions, unlike what you may think we do not get paid or whatever to come talk here to you guys, we do it because we know how hard it was/is, since most of us were on your shoes a while ago.

 

Breaking in the industry is hard enough, so if we can give you guys a little push, the better, you know?

 

And who knows maybe one day you might wanna apply here some day !

 

 

- J

[Humodour]

While the course will help you learn about the industry and begin to train you, you can make yourself stand out even more by working on some mods. It's quite easy to find a team of people that just want to mod games and it will build your experience. Doing this will also help you stand out from the crowd. You can also be the head of a mod team to let your creative ideas out right away. You don't have to get paid to make a great game.

 

As for switching to other positions, it depends on the company. I've heard stories about people from Blizzard that spend 3 years making glass break correctly and that's all they do. Obsidian has been great at letting us switch positions if we show interest and talent, but not all companies are like that.

 

A combo of schooling and side projects are your best bet if you want to get into the industry, but you should do what you want to do. If you want to design a game, be a designer, annie's post gives some great tips for that, don't settle for being a character artist if that's not what you really want to do.

 

Thanks for your reply and thanks to everyone at Obsidian for taking their time to post on here. It's very much appreciated and it really does help out people like myself who are interested in infiltrating the games industry.

 

I checked your course. Gosh it was hard to find. You'd think a university would invest in a proper website.

 

Anyway, you get accredited as a Professional computer scientist and covers pretty much typical comp sci concepts, which is good. List here:

 

http://www.ballarat.edu.au/fees/current/st...p;MajorCode=AAU

 

Hey guys, you all talk about modding. So is that really the best way to get into the industry? What if you'd been working on open source projects with a team and things like Subversion - would that stand out or not?

[Scorpion1813]

I checked your course. Gosh it was hard to find. You'd think a university would invest in a proper website.

 

Anyway, you get accredited as a Professional computer scientist and covers pretty much typical comp sci concepts, which is good.

 

Yeah, I had trouble finding anything useful on the website on in the prospectus. So when I happened to be on holiday in Australia (visiting my girlfriend) we went to the uni and asked for one of the tutors to show us around and what to expect. Which they were more than happy to do and it was a great one-on-one (or rather two-on-one) experienced that allowed me to ask anything I needed, but most of it I've forgotten.

Oh well, I'm sure it will all be fine and dandy when I finally move over at the end of this month.

[Tigranes]

You'd think a university would invest in a proper website.

 

All universities have crap websites. Even, I don't know, Harvard. It seems to be just something they do.