Continuing from the last piece I wrote about Freshers Week (A week for new students to ‘learn’ the ways of  University) at Glasgow Caledonian University, I am now here to tell you about the rest of that school year and what has been accomplished as well as what has been learnt during my time being a Game Developer.

Now, first off, I have to say that it wasn’t nearly what I expected when I first arrived. I walked through the doors of the Saltire Centre expecting to emerge at the end of the year with one or two games under my belt. True enough this happened, but the games themselves were not quite what I expected. I was fully aware that it was an introductory year and that we wouldn’t quite be doing what we had first thought, but I never imagined that we would create board games and table-top games. But what I expected less was that I would enjoy, and learn from, creating these ‘pre-historic’ games. But that is not all, creating games was in fact only a small part of this year.

The majority of my classes were comprised of basic/introductory lessons on a broad range of computing subjects, allowing a student to change streams if they feel they have made a wrong choice somewhere along the line. For instance, a Computer Networks student could switch to Computer Web Development or a Game Development student could become a Computer Network student. This was an extremely useful structure to the course as it meant that you had a more simple transition into your first year making life much easier for everyone.

Now, as to the actual classes that I studied this year. I knew the vast majority of what was being taught due to my year in college where they covered every subject except for Game Design and maths. So this made my first year that much easier and meant I had very little studying to actually do. Now the subjects were mostly revolving around the more important subject areas; Computer Systems Development, Database Development, Games Design, Programming, Multimedia Content Creation, Web Development, Computer Systems and Networks, Maths for Programming and an end of year project. Now there are a few fillers here and there but in general this covers what most computing students need to know to make an informed decision about their subject. The most useful for me being Game Design, Programming and Maths as these are the fundamental classes for a programming student. Each of these classes also contained assessments, well all except for the project, and the vast majority of them only required assessments. The two exceptions were Computer Systems and Networks and Maths for Programming. These two classes required that we sit an exam at the end of the year, which I passed, as well as the class assessments that these classes also had.

Meaning that my first year at University comprised of several subjects, each with assessments and only two exams. Can it get much more simple?

Now there was also a social aspect to the first year, as should be. Before I even started the course I had befriended two other students from my class, using an online website called yougofurther. After that there was the usual meeting/befriending/pizza eating you do with the people you meet, but also the occasional gaming day or trip to the local LAN centre that comes with being in a class full of Games students who have nothing better to do. The University also helps out in the social aspect of things, organising day trips, student organisations and most of all… the Union bar, where many a time was spent between classes. One of the best outings we had, in my opinion, was the day trip organised by our department. Where we went go-karting and lazer questing for the majority of the day. The highlight of that day was that our course organiser was in fact one of the best players campers in the Lazer Quest game.

I will bore you no-more as I leave you with a brief summary of my year at University, studying Game Development. A fun and exciting course thus far, proving to get even better as I continue into the new year in just over one month.

External Links
http://yougo.co.uk/

About the author

I am who I am, but I do not know who that is.