Education suggested for Game Development career?

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    • Education suggested for Game Development career?

      I would like to have suggestions from Game Developers on what the best route to a career in Game Development is?

      What languages does a Game Developer need to learn to code in?

      Is is better to do a Computer Science degree with a Gaming Certificate or is it better to take a Diploma program in Game Design?

      Is it better to learn on your own through Udemy? Or another inexpensive site that teaches computer programming?

      Are there Co-op programs for Computer Science that would get a new Game Developer work experience?

      Thanks.

      Cynthia Ganga

    • EwanWild wrote:

      I'm afraid I don't know much, but a very good language for game development is Visual Basic. It's fairly simple compared to some other languages but of course it depends on previous experience. JavaScript can also be a good coding language to develop games in.
      I feel like trying to code a game in Visual Basic is almost suicide. The language is built for very simple applications, not for complex things like games. It's not really that widely used in the industry in general either.

      As @arcticCold said above, Unity with C# is probably the most popular engine today, although there are others that do just as well. C# is a good language to know either way if you haven't programmed much so far.

      I wouldn't advise you to go down the route of picking a college education/diploma/whatever that is only focused on games. It has the focus on the thing you want to do, but you're also limiting yourself a lot. An IT education with a broader focus gives you way more opportunities to get good jobs in way more companies and you can still go into game development.

      Learning programming in school/college vs. learning on your own is a question you have to answer yourself, every person ticks differently. By creating projects to learn stuff on your own more will probably stick in your memory from all the experiences, but a guided education helps put everything in order and avoid stupid early mistakes. Plus, a finished education on paper is still worth a lot when applying etc (at least currently).

      Co-op programs depend on your area. Just ask around and see if any company is interested in doing something like that. Although once again, the chances would be way higher if you do IT with a broader focus... I know plenty companies hiring left and right when it comes to that area.

      (do note I'm mostly talking about the actual developer part of games, game design is a different thing that I only have limited knowledge about)

    • I've got a few friends who I did computer science with who are now doing games development both are programmers. I'm not sure what the advantage would be vs game design but Computer Science is very broad so you need to be prepared to learn quiet a few things you might not want to, but it does open up more doors as you're learning programming as well as a mix of other things (there's some engineering involved, public speaking, networking, technical stuff etc...).

      As for self learning it's a possibility, you could try that out and see if you're really into programming and if you're not well the upside is you didn't spend any money on a course you didn't like, I guess. But it's really something you have to decide for yourself because self learning is just that, you don't really have anyone to help, guide or push you.

    • I started with Scratch , there you can learn the basics .. Now i am learning JavaScript by myself .. Once you learn JavaScript you can program/code in other languages because the commands are nearly the same


      If you don't know anything about programming and code , i recomend you to start with Scratch , it really helped me