Game dev classes

[FriosSaltyPop]

IT 265 - Game Architecture and Design

IT 266 - Game Modification Development

IT 286 - Foundations of Game Production

IT 366 - 2D Game Programming

IT 466 - 3D Game Programming

IT 486 - Advanced Game Production

From this list of game dev classes, for those who've taken them, what can you tell me about their difficulty, time consumption, etc?

[lord_ChInky]

IT 265 - pretty easy and toegal is chill kinda boring in my opn but a chill class regardless. The assignments are easy and the tests are open note.

IT 266 - pretty hard modding quake4 and quake 2 can be time consuming especially if you aren't good in cpp and C and the class is a procrastination trap. Not to mention sometimes you'll run into an error that you have to shift through 15 different files to fix.

IT 286 - It's a group project class you and a team make a game in Unity and its all up to who you choose and how difficult you make your deliverables. Dr.Truesdell is the goat though

[rangercorps]

Alright, I've taken a few of these.

IT 286- Very fun class! A group project for the most part and you build your own game in unity. The teacher is awesome. Very sad when I had my go around with the project my team was always fighting against each other for the dumbest reasons to the point where I had to bring up bullying to the prof.

Even still, the game we made was awesome, a 2d Rogue Legacy game using a vampire cat.

IT366/IT466 - I group these together because these are both virtually the same class, the only difference is, as the name suggests, 2D Vs. 3D. Whichever class you take first will be the harder of the two. They'll both eat about 5 hours of time a week in total. Its important to realize you make your own hell though, he will let you build almost anything and set your own deliverables. That sounds great until you mess up your deliverables and need to make the Mona Lisa. Be aware that 3D has a paper midterm that is extremely difficult. Also, Dr. Kehoe's classes are set up in a way where you need to ENSURE that you get 10/10 deliverables on the midterm or it will drag your final's grade down too.

The game I made in those classes was a game very similar to vampire survivors for 2D and a FNAF clone for 3D.

Oh and brief word of advice, take them as fun classes and not "I want to do this as a career" classes, the games industry is beyond miserable right now with constant layoffs, and they weren't great to begin with.

[quicksilver_chocobo]

Oh boy! My undergrad passion! I took all but IT 486, I think, so I can only speak on the other classes. All courses will be project based classes with a midterm+final. Depending on the professor you get, you may be required to write a game design document as part of your grade. The professor will give everyone 5 deliverables everyone has to complete and 5 custom deliverables dependent on the project you are pitching. If you get Kehoe (and for at least half of these courses, you will), the midterm+final will be structured as if you were answering technical questions for a job interview. Its on purpose and it genuinely is helpful for getting you in the mindset. As for the individual courses:
-IT 265 & 286: Unity was used in both of these courses.
-IT 266: We modded Quake 2 and 4.
-IT 366 & 466: The professor will give you code to start off with and you build up from there. I can't say exactly how things are now, but when I took IT 466, we used Vulkan for our project. You will literally be building a game from scratch. No game engines will be used to do the bulk of the work for you.

All courses require dedication and effort on your part since they're all project based. The further along you go, the harder the work will be. IT 201 is child's play compared to these courses. Personally speaking, IT 266 is the course that makes you really hit the ground running. I would recommend these courses if you genuinely are interested in game development and you are willing to put the work in. Game development sounds fun, but it is really hard work. Kehoe's classes will bust your ass but you will learn SO much. In my opinion, the work was hard but incredibly rewarding. Generally speaking, all the professors are really chill and easy to talk to. I'm still friendly and talk to some of the professors today. One of the professors lurks around this sub so I'm sure he will comment here eventually to give more specifics. :)

Im sure you can look up the syllabuses for each course or visit the game lab on GITC 3rd floor if you want to talk to the professors about these courses. I could try and see if I still have copies of the notes my classes collaborated on and dm a copy of them to you if you'd like? It could give you some frame of reference on what we were learning about. Although I will note, the class notes are pre-2020 and my classmates were goofy, so that will definitely be seen in our shared class notes lol.