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 fourth in a seven part series.
After 2 very intensive months I completed the C++ and Entertainment Business (EB) courses here at Full Sail. The schedule during January and February consisted of attending C++ lecture from 5pm - 9pm and then lab from 9pm - 1am on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Wednesdays and Fridays belonged to EB where we had lecture from 5pm - 9pm. At the end of the month, the school had "Success Seminars" where we had the opportunity to chat with people in the industry which was very cool.
Entertainment Business was like an introduction to all the legal and business stuff that comes with making games. This isn't exactly the most exciting part of the industry, but seeing all the recent buyouts and shutdowns of different companies it's probably good information to know just in case one day your are the one that has to deal with publishers first hand. We learned about copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets.
We learned how to acquire these, how to protect them, and different laws that apply to each. Contracts were also a big part of the course. We discussed the main things every contract should contain and important things to consider when signing a contract as an employee.
After going through a lot of information we were divided into groups for our final project where we had to create a mock company. First we had to negotiate contracts with other parties and make a profit for your company following scenarios created by the Course Director. A very important lesson I learned from this part of the project was to never leave negotiations up to me, seeing how I lost a couple thousand dollars for our startup company. Luckily, my colleagues saved it from bankruptcy. The second part of the final project consisted of filling in most of the paperwork necessary to get the company up and running, which proved to be a very tedious task, but rewarding after getting our grades back. In conclusion, EB wasn't all that exciting a class since there wasn't anything related to making games but I'm pretty sure that what we learned will be useful in the future.
C++ was an excellent course and I loved every minute of it. For anyone who doesn't know, C++ is the programming language in which most videogames nowadays are written in. So as you might have already guessed, it's very important to know C++ if you want to get into the industry as a programmer. Lectures consisted of listening to the teacher explain new concepts and syntax of the language from simple loops and if-statements to classes and Object Oriented Programming.
As we were exposed to new parts of the language we watched as he applied them to a small DOS console game which got larger and more complex. Besides teaching us the language, our instructor also taught us basic programming "techniques" and little tricks to get around certain problems. These little tricks proved to be very useful in lab to say the least. Speaking of labs, we were required to write 3 to 4 programs per lab using the new concepts we learned during that day's lecture. It was really cool because the programs were more related to games than the exercises found in most C++ books and you also got a good amount of programming hours.
I would not trade the Full Sail C++ course for any other. I learned so much in so little time yet I didn't feel like it was too much information to learn, and I feel more confident about my programming than I ever have.
The weekend after we finished both C++ and EB we had the Success Seminars which Full Sail arranged for all students in all degree programs. Basically, the school invited people related to the different degree programs available at Full Sail to talk about their respective fields. Us gamers got the chance to meet Erick Dyke from n-Space, Graeme Bayless from Tiburon, Troy Dunniway from Microsoft, Jason Della Rocca from the IGDA, and John Romero and Stevie Case from Monkeystone Games. Even though we had to be there at 9am on the weekend after we got done with our night courses, the seminars were really cool and it was awesome to listen to everyone talk about how it is to be in the industry. It was especially rewarding listening to them talk about the games they have worked on, the problems that showed up during development, and how they got around the problems to release great games.
As always it's been a great learning experience this last few months. I'm glad I completed the C++ course without any problems and that I learned so many new things that will surely help in the future. I'm also glad that I had the chance to listen to everyone that took some time off to speak at Full Sail. I bet many of them were also happy to have some time off. Now I set my sights towards the more advanced programming classes. As usual, you can check this site again to read more about it.
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