Hey Guys (And/or Girls),
Myself and my brother are both trying to break into game design, both being gamers our whole lives. I'm 21 and have barely done any college yet and my brother is 18 just graduating. so I thought i'd bring some questions up and see what the general consensus is.
Do we actually need a degree to get into game design and be successful?
If the answer is yes, should we pursue a Game Development degree or a basic Computer Science degree?
Aside from that, can anybody point me in the right direction for good C# lessons/books/etc. and XNA tutorials/books?
Thanks guys.
Advice?
Firstly i want to say that i'm just a hobbyist so i can't direct you to a college that suits you. I can tell you that you do not have to do college to get into a professional career, although it might help significantly. There are plenty of hobbyist programmers (or any other part of game dev.) that made it successfully into a company or creating there own games/mods. But college does keep you on your path, it also shows you have commitment and it will most probably help you learn more in less time since it's more structured then looking up tutorials. Since you both are still young, you should pick college.
I posted a blog on how i started out here. It directs to tutorials i did so this should help you guys out a lot. I also picked C# + XNA, it's a lovely combination. Furthermore, i advice to look into C# more deeply then i did, i struggled very much with some basic OOP concepts and pretty simple C# functions when i started out with XNA. I feel i could have learned these things quicker with just C# lessons and would have gotten me less headache when implementing them in conjunction with XNA.
I know of 2 guys that [s]made[/s] still making one of the best games all time. The game is called Dwarf fortress, it shows how 2 brothers can do amazing things with enough commitment. Good luck guys!
I posted a blog on how i started out here. It directs to tutorials i did so this should help you guys out a lot. I also picked C# + XNA, it's a lovely combination. Furthermore, i advice to look into C# more deeply then i did, i struggled very much with some basic OOP concepts and pretty simple C# functions when i started out with XNA. I feel i could have learned these things quicker with just C# lessons and would have gotten me less headache when implementing them in conjunction with XNA.
I know of 2 guys that [s]made[/s] still making one of the best games all time. The game is called Dwarf fortress, it shows how 2 brothers can do amazing things with enough commitment. Good luck guys!
I am not sure what is taught in computer science but from a college point of view, lets just say "pick a different subject", I remember my 2 years in college, programming involved more excel & basic than anything else and as for databases, we used access :/ shame to be honest, if we actually did any real programming I probably would have picked computer science in uni, ah well.
Books I would recommend for C# are the following
(O' Reilly) C# in a nutshell- The book is pretty straight forward gets to the point and moves on, sadly the book doesnt have a lot of examples and only covers C# in general, all in all it is a good book to have because all the other books are too wordy.
(Apress) Professional C#- A very good book, however misses out major areas of C# like security, networking, MVC and many other areas, for what it does explain it has a lot of examples and explains them well.
(Wrox) Pro C#- This book is annoying to work with, the author writes too much for pointless things and too less for important things, however it does cover areas not included in the other sections, I would advise reading this last and ONLY the areas that are new, reading this first will result in a lot of confusion.
XNA tutorials
(O Reilly) XNA 4- This covers many areas of XNA but misses major areas like heightmaps, skyboxes etc
(Apress) Pro XNA 3- Note: This IS the XNA 3 book and a lot of the stuff written in this book wont work however majority can be translated into XNA 4, the main reason I suggest this book is that it explains XNA in more details and unlike (O Reilly) XNA 4, it actually makes sense, it also explains about heightmaps and animation too
App hub forums have a tonne load of resources on game development
HLSL
Depending on how good your math skills are and I guess programming skills, GPU Gems are a good resource for HLSL, if your maths isnt that good, you could check out the many pre-calculus books, im told 3D math primer for graphics and game development is good, honestly though I would avoid HLSL until your game has content, graphics are important but you can literally spend hours on effects and not actually achieve anything. For the sake of things HLSL is not something you want to simply copy / paste either, it pays off to understand what is going on, how each formula affects the end result
Books I would recommend for C# are the following
(O' Reilly) C# in a nutshell- The book is pretty straight forward gets to the point and moves on, sadly the book doesnt have a lot of examples and only covers C# in general, all in all it is a good book to have because all the other books are too wordy.
(Apress) Professional C#- A very good book, however misses out major areas of C# like security, networking, MVC and many other areas, for what it does explain it has a lot of examples and explains them well.
(Wrox) Pro C#- This book is annoying to work with, the author writes too much for pointless things and too less for important things, however it does cover areas not included in the other sections, I would advise reading this last and ONLY the areas that are new, reading this first will result in a lot of confusion.
XNA tutorials
(O Reilly) XNA 4- This covers many areas of XNA but misses major areas like heightmaps, skyboxes etc
(Apress) Pro XNA 3- Note: This IS the XNA 3 book and a lot of the stuff written in this book wont work however majority can be translated into XNA 4, the main reason I suggest this book is that it explains XNA in more details and unlike (O Reilly) XNA 4, it actually makes sense, it also explains about heightmaps and animation too
App hub forums have a tonne load of resources on game development
HLSL
Depending on how good your math skills are and I guess programming skills, GPU Gems are a good resource for HLSL, if your maths isnt that good, you could check out the many pre-calculus books, im told 3D math primer for graphics and game development is good, honestly though I would avoid HLSL until your game has content, graphics are important but you can literally spend hours on effects and not actually achieve anything. For the sake of things HLSL is not something you want to simply copy / paste either, it pays off to understand what is going on, how each formula affects the end result
Do we actually need a degree to get into game design and be successful?
If the answer is yes, should we pursue a Game Development degree or a basic Computer Science degree?
You don't need to be a programmer to be a game designer. Programmers are not necessarily designers, and vice versa.
If you want to make games, you don't need a degree. But it would help.
But if you want a job in games, then a degree is pretty much essential.
You might want to go over to the Breaking In forum and read the FAQs.
This For Beginners forum is for beginner programming questions.
The Breaking In forum is for discussions about jobs (careers) in games, and the FAQs discuss a lot of types of game jobs (careers) and how to prepare for them.
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