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 first in a seven part series.
Hello, my name is Gabriel Cantres, and I am currently a student at Full Sail completing the Game Design Degree Program. I was asked by Dperry.com's Webmaster to write a series of articles that would follow my journey from when I decided to pursue my dream of making games for a living, to when I end my studies here at Full Sail. There will be updates every month or two depending on how long the courses I'm taking last. With all that said and done, let's begin.
First, a little something about myself. I am 18 years old and was born in Puerto Rico. The first time I played a videogame was when I got an NES. I remember not being able to get past World 1-1 in the first Mario Bros. game. It was great just trying to beat that first level when I was a kid. When I finally beat it I was rewarded with the unforgettable fireworks, a cookie from my sister, and a whole new world to explore. The world of videogames. My first experience with PC games was with an old Hangman game we had on our old Commodore 64. Shortly after that, my family acquired a 486 where I enjoyed titles such as Aces of the Pacific, Secret of Monkey Island, and Stunts, among others. They would have me glued to the computer for hours and hours. Stunts was the first time I was able to customize a game. It had a track editor with which you could edit, or create new tracks. My brother and I made tracks and then try to beat our times, great fun. Shortly after this my neighbor, who was playing DOOM, introduced me to the world of first person shooters. My friends and I would go to his house and just watch in awe.
Before we knew it DOOM became Quake, and now everybody was playing it. By this time I was introduced to more games, Command & Conquer, Mechwarriors, Wing Commander, Dungeon Keeper, Jedi Knight, and Master of Orion 2 were some of my favorites. My desire to work in the gaming industry was born during this time, but hadn't really grown. During this time I became increasingly addicted to PC games, and I just had to buy more. Unfortunately my 200mHz computer couldn't handle most of the new games coming out which required graphics cards and such-due to this I stopped playing PC games for a while and missed out on many excellent titles. Behold the N64. Goldeneye, Mario Kart, Zelda , Wave Race, etc. I enjoyed most of the Nintendo and Rare games for N64, until I finally got a new computer.
Half-Life. A friend of mine introduced me to Half-Life and I was immediately blown away by the single player experience. After that I really got into Half-Life modifications and have been playing them ever since. I was fortunate enough to meet the creators of the Front Line Force mod (www.flfmod.com), and from them I have witnessed firsthand the amount of work, love, and dedication that goes into making a game. I've also met some people that work in the games industry through Half-Life mods that have been a great inspiration to me, and who have given me lots of useful advice.
As I continued playing games I became convinced that I wanted to program them for a living, and so my journey began. I constantly read news sites, and read as many interviews and articles I could about the industry. This way I learned a lot about what working in the industry was and how games were made. I got my hands on lots of demos and got a job as a paperboy so I could buy games. I started reading a bit about programming and "studied" the games I played, finding out the things I liked as well as the things I didn't like. Also, I began the necessary steps to skip my senior year to start college as soon as possible. Started college at 16 with a Computer Science major. As classes became increasingly slow and boring, I began looking for alternatives and stumbled upon dperry.com where I first found out about Full Sail (www.fullsail.com) and Digipen (www.digipen.edu). Digipen seems like a great school and it probably is (Eric Smith from Valve Software graduated from Digipen), unfortunately I did not have good enough grades to be admitted. So I set my sights on Full Sail.
After reading through a lot of information, I was convinced that going to Full Sail was exactly what I wanted to do. Full Sail did not require you to have good grades to get in, they understand that not everyone is interested in Shakespeare or the Roman Empire. They just care that you are interested in your future, passionate about what you do, and want to study there to learn the trade. (The fact that you are paying them large sums of money helps too). That's why Full Sail cares more about your attendance than anything else. If you have less than 90% attendance in any course you automatically fail and have to pay the cost to repeat that course. If you fail because of your grades, you can repeat the class one more time without paying. They even give you an award for perfect attendance which is a hard thing to accomplish believe it or not. This is a great policy that really motivates you to do your best while at school.
I decided to attend a tour of the school to see it firsthand and so my parents could at last understand what I kept babbling about. The school is amazing. It is located in Winter Park, Florida and is composed of two office buildings stuffed with millions of dollars of equipment. It's a great learning environment. All the hallways and classrooms are colorful all around, even the offices look cool. Most of the labs have windows so you can sneak a peek inside and see the awesome stuff computer animations students are working on, or clips from the film students' projects. Also, most of the classrooms are equipped with a PC, a small console with a microphone, a VCR, and a CD player among others things connected to it for all types of multimedia presentations.
The labs' computers have tons of software depending on what that lab is intended for. Software includes Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, GoLive, Premiere (film), Maya, 3D Studio Max, ProTools (for audio students) and lots more. I definitely wanted to attend the school. I discussed everything with my parents, and they began to understand what my dream was, and they backed me up 100%. I finished my freshman year in college, and started classes at Full Sail in August.
The first 3 months at Full Sail are known as "general education". People from all degree programs will take classes together during these first months. This is great because you get to meet all sorts of creative people and make contacts which might be useful in the future (like an audio person for your gaming project), or someone from the computer animation degree program to make your characters. During the first month we took 2 courses, Introduction to Media Arts and Behavioral Science. IMA introduced me to a lot of things used in the entertainment industry like film cameras, consoles, the science behind sound and light, how televisions and radios work, video editing, the way digital audio is recorded, and lots of other things. I learned a lot of great information during that course that although not gaming related is great to know. The course was 4 hour lectures 3 days a week.
The other course during the first month was Behavioral Science. For the most part, it was a very abstract class, teaching studying technique and the like, but what was good about it is that we had group assignments so we could really work with different people and get to network. During September we took only one course, Computers Media and Internet. There we learned about the creation of the transistor, how computers were invented, the creation of the Internet, we even learned how processors were made which was quite cool. Also, we had labs where we learned the basics of Adobe Photoshop, GoLive, Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint and more.
Everyone who might be thinking they're too advanced to take this class, you are able to test out of almost every class in your degree program during the first 2 weeks and get a refund. I've decided to take all the courses regardless if I already knew the material, due to the fact that I want to take advantage of every course and squeeze all the information I can out of them. The course I am currently taking is Multimedia Productions, which can be described as an extension of IMA. This is one of the most rigorous courses we have to take because of its schedule. We have four hour lectures Monday through Saturday, and 16 four hours labs throughout the month. These labs might be at 5pm as well as 1am or 5am. It mainly deals with audio equipment, and the different ways audio is used. We learned what digital audio workstations were and got to use some to put audio into films, we did voice over for short films that we shot ourselves, used software to create our own music loops, and played around with a very expensive console. The lectures covered a lot of material, some interesting, some very boring.
Luckily all the tests have been easy and I've been getting good grades. It has been a very busy month during Multimedia Productions, but it's finally over. I am ready and anxious to begin with the Game Design courses which will be starting in November, and continue until late next year.
I hope that this information has been useful to you, especially if you're considering attending a school like Full Sail. There's not much advice I can give to people like me, aspiring to work in the games industry, but I congratulate you guys for setting goals in your lives and knowing exactly what you want to do. Good luck to you all. I invite you all to read the next installment of this series when I enter the world of physics and math.
Posted by: Sherry at June 19, 2006 7:53 PM
I think it is really interesting that you are doing this. I really hope you enjoy your stay in orlando and like full sail. I tried my best to get the most out of full sail, be careful the school is corrupt and the teachers are not qualified. You find much of this out after the gen ed. I've been out of full sail for over a year, there are many great things I learned there, but there isn't a month that passes that I get my student loans and dont wish that I learned them somewhere else. Take care
Posted by: Jason at June 13, 2006 10:52 AM
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Full sail is a cattle call. They are in it for the money.. went there years ago when it was tough. Taught there for a few years. It is keeped quit within the ranks. Drug and alcohol problem there and I am not talking about the students but the staff. The Course Dir. of Soundfoundations is a mess and they do nothing about it. Bill Smith covers for him coz they are old buddies. The Dir. of Soundfoundations fires instructors who start to stand up to his BS and start to complain. No one instuctor stays long in his course. The place went down hill after Garry Platt left and started his own school in San Fransisco.