Gabriel Cantres gave DPerry.com a stream of updates and impressions from his stint at the Full Sail School of Game Development and Design. This is the second in a seven part series.
I have completed my first month of the actual Game Design program at Full Sail and it's been a blast. I'm happy the schedule during this month wasn't as crazy as the one before it, no more 1am or 5am labs. Now we take class in smaller classrooms because we don't take classes with students from other degree programs. It gives you that small development studio feeling when you look around. Also during this month us gamers received our laptop computers, which we will be using during our programming classes in the future and to create our final projects. The classes I took this month were "Physics and Math" and "General Design Fundamentals".
General Design Fundamentals (GDF) is best described as a creative writing class. We wrote a lot of essays about topics given in class and short stories emphasizing character development and world description. We had lectures on storytelling, game design documents, character creation, and grammar. This course had some cool labs, like the Lego lab where we had to build something as teams and write down the instructions. Another team had to build what you did following the instructions you wrote. It was very fun watching the results, most of them were disastrous to say the least. It gives you an idea of how hard it must be for game designers to communicate with their team.
In another lab we went to a local arcade where we played games and later analyzed them and wrote critiques. GDF was a really cool class that allowed me to get in touch with my creative side and put some ideas on paper. It was also a good class to take after doing lots of math.
Physics and Math is the first 2-month class I have encountered here at Full Sail and I wish it were longer. It is basically a crash course in basic mathematics needed in game programming. So far we have covered the math part of the course and started the physics, which will continue until the end of the class. I am very happy with this class to say the least. My attitude towards math has completely changed from my days in high school since I started taking this course.
We have excellent teachers that teach swiftly and clearly which is perfect for the fast pace nature of the school, and I give them credit for renewing my interest in math. During the first month we dealt mostly with the Cartesian coordinate system. Graphing functions and linear equations, finding equations of lines, circles, ellipses, parabolas, solving right triangles, all that good stuff. We also learned about matrices and how to use them to transform, rotate, and scale objects. The labs for this course consisted of more practice problems, or doing experiments to see the relation between mathematic equations and real life objects.
It has been a great month overall. I got to meet the rest of the gamers in my class, and the courses are really cool. It's fun attending Full Sail and I wouldn't trade it for any other school. I just wish Physics and Math lasted longer because there's so much more math you can learn, yet so little time. I am now taking the second part of "Physics and Math" and a new course called "Networks and Operating Systems" which I will write about in the next article before I go home for Christmas.
For now, let me get back to studying.
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