What is the best college/university for video game programming?

Video game engines and programming languages?

• First off, I'd like to say I'm not out to offend anyone. I have no experience whatsoever, that's why I'm asking. I hope you'll answer with respect toward me as that's how I'm asking: with respect toward you. I have no experience with any of this and am only interested in it as a hobby for the time being. Everywhere I look, the starting place for creating video games is to learn programming languages that people have spent 10 years learning and still learn new things about every day. As much as I love gaming, I can't dedicate that much of my life to this, especially when what I've seen of programming doesn't interest me. Is this really how it works? 10 years of programming or you're out of luck? I thought games were built around engines, such as Unreal. I thought these engines were built by the professional programmers, not the games themselves. Is programming required when using engines? If so, is it 10 years of C, or something less overwhelming? If not, then why would someone interested in making games need to learn programming? Are engines alone just that limited? If yes to THAT, then what's an example of a game so innovative and so revolutionary that it simply couldn't be created within an existing engine? If you have time, throw everything you're willing and able to at me, not just answers to these questions. I'm having a hard time researching this on my own.

• Answer:

  Programming is required because the engine is just the framework to build around. Its hard to explain without going overkill on the technical terms. video game designers/programmers still have to know and understand programming languages. That is how you code in every single action of a video game. A physics engine might already exist to do the physics calculations of the objects in the game, but you still need to program in all those objects, interactions, and the entire world itself. Its not just some big copy and paste inventory where you pick what you want. You still have to code to create every single thing in a video game from the characters, to the items, to the interactions and even the entire world. The engines just give some overall framework. And thats not even taking all the toubleshooting into account. Most games take so long to put out because of little bugs or glitches. These are caused by the interactions of different systems in the game. It takes a very astute programmer to go through lines and lines and lines of code to find what the problem is. Definitely need to have a solid understanding of programming to do this. This isn't going to be a perfect analogy but think of it like this. Suppose you want to build a big building. The engine that you're talking about would be like then... foundation of the building. But thats it, just the foundation. You still need to use physics and engineering to design the entire structure, the foundation just gives you something to build off of much in the same way the pre-existing engines give a programmer a framework to build around.