Blog - EGD Year 2: Completed
Tuesday, July 29, 2008Sorry It's been a while since I've posted here, but I took a break after EGD ended. The last week was rather hectic and then I took a small vacation. Now I'm back, and with plenty to say about what I learned this year teaching the camp.
First of all, I didn't think I should have to say this but this year at camp proved me wrong: to any students out there who want to learn video game development, you should bone up on your basic computer skills.
Seriously. I'll just leave that statement as that.
Secondly, my comments after last year's camp sessions continued to ring true. Most notably, the fact that teaching at the camp has provides priceless experience in allowing me to witness many small game projects get made.
We instructors referred to ourselves as the publishers. The teams had to pitch their game to us, and only proceed when their pitch was green-lit. From there we'd have regular meetings with the developers to ensure their project was on schedule and looking good. We'd play builds and critique them, guiding their design, production, art, etc.
It is in that role that I have now overseen the development of over 20 games.
Not AAA titles or anything that will ever see the light of day on store shelves, but games nonetheless.
The fact that these student games were made in such an insanely tight time-frame helped focus my observations on game development to such crystal clarity.
The EGD game projects are entirely built in just over a week. One week is easy to break down into where time was spent: initial development vs iterations vs polish vs QA bug-hunting vs time the developers wasted playing games, etc.
As I'm overseeing many of these game projects all at once, over the course of a couple months, it is as though the camp itself is allowing me to quickly run iterations on the act of game development itself.
Definite patterns arise among games that succeeded and games that failed.
Even if the individual games are not something I could put on my resume, they may have done more for my own education as a student of game development than my own games have.
So once again, I'd like to state that teaching at EGD was an amazing and valuable experience.
For those interested, I'd like to warn that the instructor positions got filled very early this year, and I know quite a few people who got turned down. If you can get it, though, it's a great deal. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 4:32 PM
2 Comments:
said...
Oy, it's Adam from team psychosis from session 2.
I'm kinda wondering if any pictures from camp exist? as id like to have some for old time memories sake.. lol
Brian Shurtleff said...
Hi Adam.
I don't think there's much in the way of pictures of camp.
Emagination usually has people around snapping pictures for their website. However, they don't usually come by the EGD room, and I don't remember anyone taking any pictures of us like that this year.
Still, if you want to dig through all of the camps pictures to see if you can find any of us, here's the link: http://www.computercamps.com/Gallery/albums.php and look in the Massachusetts album.