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 fifth in a seven part series.
Three months have passed since my last update. Let me fill you in on what has happened here at Full Sail. Since C++ and Entertainment Business I've gone through 4 and a half more courses. These were Fundamentals of Windows Programming (FWP), Media and Society (MS), Rules of the Game (ROTG), Structure of Game Design (SGD), and Real Time Modeling for Games (RTMG). I also had the chance to attend the Games Developers Conference (GDC) in San Jose, CA during the end of March.
After I was done with C++ in February I started FWP and MS. Both classes were a month long and the schedules were very light which was a good time to relax and prepare for the months to come. FWP was an introduction to Win32 and MFC programming (MFC stands for Microsoft Foundation Classes, the classes are used to create Windows programs in an Object-Oriented manner). At first we learned the basics of Win32 programming and made simple Tic-Tac-Toe and Pong games. We were later introduced to MFC and we made a very simple tile editor as our final project.
The class was really easy especially since the MSDN library has almost everything you need to know about Windows programming. The days we didn't have FWP we had Media and Society which was another easy, short course. Basically we were lectured on the media and how marketing is used through different mediums, different types of marketing, and different ways that companies operate nowadays.
Near the end of these two courses I was able to go to the GDC with some of my classmates. While at GDC we had a chance to see a lot of cool software and technology coming out for gaming as well as games to be released in the near future. We also had the chance to see and meet people in the industry and talk about the games they have worked on. It was awesome seeing people you read about in websites and magazines just wandering around and checking out new games and stuff. Another very exciting thing to witness at GDC was the Game Developers Choice Awards. This is where games and developers are recognized and awarded by their peers.
I got to see a lot of people on stage that night including Dave Perry presenting awards and just having fun. Amongst all the big name titles and developers at GDC and the awards was a strong presence from the independent community. There were about 20 games being showcased at GDC, half from students and half from independent developers. They also had their own award show where money was given to the winners as prizes. I think it's great that the indy development community is slowly gathering more recognition and I hope they start getting more exposure in news sites and such.
When I got back to Florida from GDC it was time to start our new courses, Structure of Game Design and Rules of the Game. ROTG was a one month class that lasted all of April. The course was very short and simple and the lectures were like an open discussion. Our teacher, Dave Arneson (co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons), would bring up different topics about current gaming events, trends in games, genre specific topics, new games coming out, and we would talk about them. Dave would also talk about his experience with certain things and give us some advice about making games and working in the industry. During labs we simply played board, card, and computer games.
SGD was a very fun and very busy class that carried on from the beginning of April to the end of May. Lectures were primarily centered on different components of DirectX such as DirectDraw, DirectShow, DirectSound, and DirectInput. Besides these DirectX components we talked about other things important things that must be taken care of when making a game. Things like schedules and how they're never followed correctly, game balancing, planning the soft architecture for your game (or how your classes are going to interact with each other in the game's code). Other days we had brief lectures to review math, collision, discuss animation engines, game engines, or 2d tile engines, etc. We had 2 big projects to do for SGD.
The first one had to be finished within the last 3 weeks of the first month of the course. It was an individual project using DirectDraw, the gameplay had to be similar to that of the original Asteroids. The second project was a team project that would take us the second month to complete. Our teacher decided the members of each group, and we were required to create our own tile engine. We would simulate a publisher / developer relationship where the teacher was the publisher and the groups were different developers. There were 4 milestones to be met to gain a percentage of the overall grade. They were split so that we had about 1 week in between each milestone.
By the first milestone we had to have a game idea approved. The second milestone required us to turn in all the documentation for our game. For the third milestone each group had to have the game in a playable state and up to the schedule which was handed in with the rest of the game's documentation. By the fourth and last milestone the game had to be completed and turned in, also each group had to present their project in front of the class. After the 4 milestones you should have your grade for your second project and the course is basically over except for the final exam. Both projects were great learning experiences for me. Believe it or not, I learned as much about teamwork as I did about programming during this course.
During our second month of SGD, right after Rules of the Game, we began Real Time Modeling for Gaming. We didn't do any programming during the first month; we focused on learning about 3D environments and characters and everything else we needed to know about 3D information to be able to program movements and AI for 3D models. We were also lectured on how to model using Multigen Creator. During this time we learned about texturing, modeling, shading, lighting, and techniques to use to make them all look better or run faster in a real-time environment.
In the early labs we just followed some tutorials and we practiced what we learned during lecture that day. 2 weeks into the course we began with our complex model project. We had to model and texture a 1000 - 1500 poly model which we would use for our 3D project the next month. Learning how to model was a really cool experience for me, I thought it would be much harder than it actually was and I had a lot of fun. Besides learning how to model I realized that now I can easily communicate with 3D artists because I know more about their field, I recommend all 3D programmers to do this.
The last 3 months at Full Sail have been the best yet, and it's only going to get better. I have learned lots more about programming and even how to model. We are finally programming games, it's a great feeling when you play something that you created. I can't wait to start with the future courses where we will learn more about networking, AI, and 3D programming. Next up, second month of RTMG, OpenGL, and networking. Wish me luck.
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