What school are good for game programming?

How to teach game programming at school?

• I'm in this private school right now, and apart from my progressive stoppage of anti-depressants, I'm having an hard time focusing on what the school wants me to do. The school has a professional contract for a game we have to do with Unity. I don't really learn anything new while using unity, so I don't like using it. We recently learned how to use DirectX, and we have to do some sort of Gradius-precursor clone (Parsec) with directX, in 3D: this annoys me, and I'm currently learning to use Ogre3D by myself by making some game. The teacher is an engineer, and all of us won't be engineers. How would you teach game programming ?

• Answer:

  The big problem is that many people don't enjoy programming enough to warrant learning to use DirectX or OpenGL. Also you shouldn't (always) reinvent the wheel; even when using something like Ogre3D, you're a long way from having the basics of Unity implemented. It's easier to start with Unity and introduce them to Unity scripting, and they will have more fun with it. I am of the opinion that something like Unity or Game Maker should be taught first. Game programming is basically segregated into several sub-categories: game scripting (possibly including AI scripting), engine programming, tools programming. The easiest and most fun of these is game scripting, which would be what you do in Unity, Game Maker, etc. You are obviously more interested in engine programming (or just low-level game development, whatever category that fits in - all of them?) but I don't believe that's the universal way to teach game programming. So to directly answer your question, teach game programming by starting with game scripting in an existing engine and toolkit such as Unity, because this will appeal to the most people. Those that want to dive deeper (lower-level) can then be introduced to DirectX/OpenGL/Ogre3D.