Hey everybody!

First and foremost, I don't want this to be a huge discussion of which college is better, blah blah. I just need some advice of what I should do to get my feet in the door as a Game Developer. I recently enrolled into DeVry's GSP program (March 2010) and this week I'm taking my finals and then I'm in a 2 week summer break. I've taken four courses at this point, with straight A's so far.

I'm really starting to reconsider enrollment. I'm taking the online courses to fit my schedule (I'm married so I work full-time to provide for my wife and I) and the website design is terrible. I won't go into a huge discussion on it, so let's just leave it at that. Classes are a breeze, you basically just read the textbook and then take a quiz over it by the end of the week (depending on the class), which is a real problem. There's almost no interaction with the Professor other than the discussions, which some Professor's hardly participate in regardless.

It's almost too easy to pass the classes, and the first GSP class (while it has an awesome Professor) is just a joke. Before you begin the class, the school gives you a free pro version of GameMaker 7 (even though the most updated release is GameMaker 8) so you figure that's the version you would use, right? Wrong. The class honestly grades you on doing the tutorials that YoYo Games created, which are written for GameMaker 8.

I've been programming for a number of years, and I really just want to learn more about C++ programming to advance levels, and I think having a degree in it and an experienced Professor would really help me. Most of the GSP classes revolve around modding games, or using the Torque engine, and from what I can see, you take maybe one or two classes on C++ programming.

I'm really starting to reconsider just ending enrollment so I'm not over 60 grand in debt, and going to a local university to get a master's in Computer Science. This is why I'm here; what advice would you give me at this point? This is my first college I've ever attended so everything is new to me, and I wanted some experienced advice from you guys :-D. Thanks a lot for taking the time to read this and help me!

TLDR: DeVry's GSP program seems like a joke and I'm considering switching to a local university to obtain a degree in Computer Science instead. What do?

Your better off just going for a degree in computer science. Not only will it open more career paths for you (in case you don't get hired right away and need to take a job in the interim while applying to various developers), but game design as a major in most places is in an effort to cash in on the growing interest in pursuing game design as a career. Unfortunately most places that offer it don't offer a good program in it.

Either their program is just a joke, or their teachers are so under-qualified, that they would answer "a snake" to the question, "What is python?"

These are programs that use simple hype do-it-yourself game engines to "teach" their course rather than using one of the good free, or cheap engines (such as Unreal Development Kit, Blender Engine, or Torque) or paying for an educational copy of one of the many industry engines (Like Valve's Source, or Epic's Unreal, or Emergent's Gamebryo. All of which offer educational licensing. Unreal, though, currently offers the Unreal Dev Kit, now, instead of educational licensing, I believe).

For the most part, game design is apart from programming, especially nowadays. Designers can be programmers and programmers can be designers, but unless it's a small release or a small company, people rarely do both professionally because of the time demand that both jobs require. There are many designers that do little, or no coding at all (Chris Avellone, for example). I'm of the opinion that game design is more on the side of writing in the respect that it takes both craft, innate feeling and creativity. You can't teach innate feeling or creativity, all you teach is craft. And paying upwards of $60K for just craft isn't worth it, in my opinion. You can easily design games on your own while you learn computer science instead of trying to devote your time to both studying Game Design, which as I said, isn't a real major at most institutions.

So yeah, my long-winded answer can best be explained as this: Go for computer science.

Thank you so much, TheDade. I really appreciate an honest answer with detail behind every bit of it. I read a lot of posts saying basically the same thing you did, that more career opportunities open up with a degree in Computer Science, and you typically learn about programming through it rather than with a degree in "Game Design" as you mentioned.

Again, thank you so much for really helping me!