Looking for insight, suggestions on game designing

[Nullifidian]

First of all, just to break your bubble, don't expect to just release an xbox live game on your own. All of the somewhat bigger and more fun games are made by studios with a dozen of people working on it. Even the smaller games aren't made by just one person.

Take it from someone who has experience in the games industry, a degree is not really what they're looking at BUT school will guide you much better than if you were on your own. That is, if you choose the right school.
You get:
-Experience
-Knowledge
-Skill
-Guidance
-Contacts in the games industry
-Help in building a portfolio
-Interships (I don't know if the schools there offer internship but if they do, you learn so so much)

In the games industry it's not so much what you can do on paper, but what you can actually show. You build a portfolio during your school years and that is pretty much your resume. For all 3 main game professions this is the case. Programmers, designers and artists are all checked at through their portfolio, rather than their degree.
You can be in the games industry without education too if you don't have any background or experience in the games industry through school, but you have to be damn good regardless of your background.
The people who hire you don't think: "Oh, well he's great in level design but has no degree.. too bad." or "Oh hey, this guy is bad in level design but he does have a degree! HIRED!"
They hire you based on what you can do for the studio.

What's really needed is a good mindset and motivation -and- you have to keep working on your skills. Without skills you won't get anywhere, no matter how "great" you think your ideas might be. Granted it's a good school in the first place, school provides a good work environment for the time being (until you get internships).

I don't know much about the programming side of the games industry as I'm in the art field but check into working with game engines and if you can, participate in a game mod project. If you have experience in game engines or game mods you're more likely to find a school/internship/job that will accept you based on your history of working with game related projects.

Originally Posted by Cyr

I'm sorry but if you go to college and get a degree in video game design....you've failed.
Everyone else who sees it on your resume will think the same thing.

That's a really ignorant statement to make. The studios I've worked at, pretty much all of the programmers, designers and artists had a masters or bachelors degree in their field of study. Even those without a bachelors degree did a form of education here called mbo, which is one step below bachelors.

[DotKritic]

Understood. Thanks for sharing what I could expect.

[Choofers]

Originally Posted by Cyr

I'm sorry but if you go to college and get a degree in video game design....you've failed.
Everyone else who sees it on your resume will think the same thing.

you really need to stop posting

[Zageron]

If you're motivated enough to educate yourself for 6-8 hours per day, for a full year, while working part time. (Using high quality resources, and pumping out an impressive demo reel.)

Then be the worlds guest, and skip school. But I can assure you that doing self directed learning of that magnitude is extremely difficult, which is why school is a great alternative.

[DotKritic]

I plan on working either full- or part-time while going to school part-time. There is ONE community college (out of maybe 4 or 5 other CCs) that offer courses in game design. The one CC offers just an occupational certificate in IT Introduction to Game Design/Development.

[Zageron]

It sounds like you have a rough idea of what you want to do, but there is a large difference between game design and game programming. Be aware, and choose your educational direction carefully.

[DotKritic]

Game design. Design.

[Nullifidian]

Game design is designing and developing the gameplay (including but not limited to level design, interaction design between the player and the game, and gameplay mechanics such as jumping, shooting or level up stats), programming is making it all work how it should. Both require knowledge of programming but the game designer is more or less the "creative" programmer while the game programmer is the "hardcore" programmer who makes all of it work as intended.

Be wary of how you go about this though. Making yourself aware and picking the right school is very important as is being able to invest a lot of time into your development.
There are schools who offer the course but have little to no actual knowledge and experience of the games industry. That's not the kind of school you want to go to as it's usually filled with bad habits by teachers who haven't been active in the games industry for years and students who don't apply to anything (with rare exceptions). You'll be sitting in class picking your nose doing nothing with teachers teaching you about something they hardly have a grasp of themselves (this is the case with my current school). I had to educate myself on my field of study, got accepted into 2 of the best studios in the netherlands for internship and I learned more than I learned during the 3 years of teaching at the school as well as throwing away outdated ideas that my teachers "taught" me.
Right now I got accepted to an art school with actual people from the games industry who are actively working in the industry as well and produce great results among students that graduate there.

Be very careful with how you're gonna plan in your study. I suggest doing a full time education game design and part time job instead of the other way around. You're gonna have to invest a lot of time and effort into your study if you want to make it in the games industry. The more knowledge, experience and skill you have, the better prepared you are and more likely that you'll get a job offer. If you can work your way up to better schools through scholarships or whatever, do it.

[fido123]

Originally Posted by Zageron

In order of importance, I guess...
Python to learn what programming is, and how to do it.
Learn HTML5 and CSS3. (This is a must!)
Then C++, Java, ObjectiveC, PHP, and/or C#, depending on what you want to do. For XBLA you'll need to learn C#.

Why would anybody going into game design need to learn web technologies such as HTML, CSS, or PHP? Java isn't really an optimal choice unless you're developing an indie game and want it to go multi-platform but I don't know much about Java.

Anyway if you want to learn how to program apparently Python is pretty good for that but their documentation is pretty garbage. If you REALLY want to get into this I'd buy a book on plain ol' C. C is pretty much the grandfather of most languages such as C++, C#, Perl, Java, PHP etc etc. You'll have a lot better understanding of what's going on, and it's still used quite a lot in all industries as it's faster than pretty much every other programming language out there, every conventional one at least.

However if you're looking at becoming a designer I know nothing about that but I'd imagine that market is saturated. Also if you ARE going into the programming, you're not going to like it just because it's video games, you need to actually like programming.

EDIT: Also I'm pretty sure game design in particular involves things like physics and calculus.

[DotKritic]

The Art Institute of Houston is really the only place in Houston that I can learn Game Art & Design and get a Bachelors. Pretty pricey though. More than Full Sail I think.

edit: Yup. About $25,000 more than Full Sail.