Quote Originally Posted by Depression Moon View Post
I'm more of the creative type. I like writing and coming up with ideas about the gameplay and level design. If you're saying I need to specialize I guess it would make sense if I were to go for my creative fields, but I was wondering that game employers are mostly looking for programmers and animators. I hate programming, but I am taking a course in animation too, but I haven't done much work on that either as I have the same instructor for that class too.
Please note the following is not meant to be discouraging at all. I'm just trying to toss in a dose of reality.

I'm afraid that your decision making is going to have to become quite a bit more focused than you seem to be realizing. If you ever expect to approach video game development as a possible career path, you have to find where in the development process you best fit. You say you're interested in story writing, gameplay development, and level design. I think you're severely underestimating the amount of specialization you're going to be forced to adopt.

Take a look at any video game's credits. Even for smaller design studios, you don't see the same name listed under all three of those fields. Hell, I'd imagine you'd be hard pressed to find the same name listed under two of the three. If you're serious about making this your career and not merely a hobby, you're going to have to make a decision at some point.

That said, I think the more important question to ask yourself is exactly how highly developers are going to value any sort of degree in video game design? More importantly, since it's the first time your community college has offered this course, it's probably not even worth your time and effort. As Omecle has already said, a degree in video game design isn't looked upon with any particular amount of respect in the video game industry (I'd imagine most of the people working in the industry don't have a degree in game design not because it's worthless, but because such courses didn't exist); imagine then how they'll react to a degree in video game design from a college they've likely not even heard of.

I think Omecle is right on the ball here with his advice. If you want to be an artist, major in fine arts. If you want to write scripts for a game, major in English or do a creative writing program. Obviously, familiarize yourself with programming as that's a large part of the process and it will make you more useful in the long run, but try not to have unrealistic expectations. A lot of people think that because they like playing games they're really going to enjoy making them as well, but they're not always aware of what exactly that requires.

I can't provide much of a perspective from the artistic or programming side, but if you plan on writing for games, keep in mind that if a game has a story, it's typically fleshed out by the individual who has the main concept for the plot. This individual (frequently, as I understand it, called the scenario director) will then oversea the rest of the story's development. Don't fool yourself into thinking he actually writes out a large portion of the dialogue like a screenplay for a movie. Game developers, especially the big name developers, will hire freelance writers to write the dialogue.

You need to decide where you want to ultimately end up, and then you need to research how exactly one gets there. You're not going to start as the person who writes the plot. You're going to be that guy writing the dialogue for some other guy's story. That's just something you need to keep in mind throughout your pursuit of this career.