Skillset Accreditation!
We’ve been given an early Christmas present here at Sheffield Hallam in the form of Skillset accreditation for our BSc and MComp degrees in Games Software Development!
Skillset are the Creative Industries’ Sector Skills Council, who provide a rigorous accreditation scheme which is endorsed by the games industry and is conducted by a panel made up of games industry professionals. Hallam is now one of only two universities in the UK to have received accreditation for both its undergraduate and postgraduate game programming degrees (we received Skillset accreditation for our MSc in Games Software Development in 2009).
Put simply, the accreditation means that the games industry agrees that these courses are teaching the right kind of content to prepare students for jobs as programmers in the games industry. That means C++ for breakfast, diner and tea with generous helpings of mathematics, hardware architectures, games console programming and interdisciplinary teamwork as well! We work our students HARD to prepare them for a career in an exciting and challenging field.
As part of the accreditation process we’ve also had to show that our students have succeeded in obtaining employment in the games industry after graduating from these courses. That wasn’t a problem for us either, but if you’re thinking of applying to a game programming degree course like ours then you shouldn’t run away with the idea that it will guarantee you a job in the games industry. Skillset accreditation shows that an institution provides the right opportunity for students to succeed: the rest is up to you. It’s a bit like joining a gym. It may have great facilities and experienced personal trainers, but if you don’t turn up and work hard then it still won’t make you any fitter!
Merry Christmas!
Two More For Sumo
Another two lucky Sheffield Hallam students started internships at Sumo-Digital this week, bringing the total number of students at Sumo to FIFTEEN. That’s got to be a reason to celebrate – if only we had a cake…
Dare to be Crunchtime
For the second year running two teams of students from Sheffield Hallam qualified for the prestigious Dare to be Digital competition at Abertay. Teams get paid to spend around 10 weeks developing a prototype game to be shown at the Protoplay festival in Dundee. I briefly popped in to see them last week and was really impressed by what they had achieved so far, but they looked so very tired. It’s clearly crunch time up there and all 15 of the teams are giving it everything they’ve got to get ready for the festival. And as they might, because the winning team each year gets a BAFTA for their efforts which they recieve at the BAFTA game awards along with all of their industry heros.
Each of the teams has written a short blog article about their experiences which has been published over at Develop Online. You can read Team Fatdog’s here and Crispy Nugget Studio’s here. Both are 100% Sheffield Hallam students coming from both undergraduate and Masters courses. Here’s a picture af the teams taken a bit earlier on in the competition when they looked a bit more relaxed (Crispy Nugget Studios on the left and Fatdog on the right).
Good luck guys!!!
Learning Twice
Despite spending over a decade earning my living by developing videogames, it made a lot of sense for me to make the move from the games industry into university teaching. It’s not actually the first time I’ve left the games industry, and I took three years out once before in order to study for a PhD in the Learning Sciences at the University of Nottingham. I’ve had a long-standing interest in the way people learn, and there are lots of parallels between good game design and good educational practice (see James Paul Gee or Raph Koster’s books if you need convincing). After completing my PhD research, I returned to the games industry for a while as Sumo-Digital’s Head of Serious Games. Although it was great fun to work with the talented guys at Sumo, my real passion is for combining games and learning, and that’s exactly what I do now as a Senior Lecturer inGames Software Development at Hallam.
So with a wealth of professional experience developing “games software” and a Ph.D in the psychology of learning, you might think that teaching my subject to undergraduates would be an easy task. Apart from the fact that lecturing requires surprisingly more physical energy than game development, I’ve had to put a lot of mental energy into the design and planning of learning material for my modules too. The old adage, “To teach is to learn twice” is very true, and I’ve sometimes ended up challenging my own understanding of subject material which I’ve taken for granted in my job for years. Moreover, presenting complicated ideas in a way which is easy for novices to understand and learn from, is an art in itself. Perhaps my students would disagree, but one of the things I’d like to think that I’m quite good at is being able to cast off my knowledge and experience and view a subject with beginner’s eyes. I believe that’s one of the successful things about the hobbyist game development books I’ve been involved in. I always try and write as if I am starting with a blank slate providing the reader with enough background information to understand what they are doing and why. However, teaching experience has taught me that the reality is more complicated than that, and that students are far from empty vessels that need filling with knowledge.
Games Britannia at Brinsworth
I went back to school last week to run some Game Maker workshops at Brinsworth Academy as part of their Games Britannia Videogame Festival. I was really impressed with the efforts that the organisers had gone to to arrange such an event at their school, which included a whole range of speakers and workshops during the week. It seems that I wasn’t the only one to be impressed as they’ve won an award for it and there is talk of bigger and better plans for next year…
Minions Lend Weight to Sumo
The concept behind the Steel Minions studio was always to help students to gain employment and internship opportunities within the games industry, but we had never dreamt that within 6 months of setting is up we would be sending 13 students over to Sumo Digital’s studio near Meadowhall. Sumo are South Yorkshire’s largest game developer and have a heritage that goes back to Gremlin Graphics in the 1980′s. We always stress to students applying to the games courses that getting placements and internships within the games industry is very hard – and it certainly is – but the Steel Minions studio has allowed us to capitalise on our relationship with Sumo to get an unheard of number of students into internships working on real console games. This is so unusual it even made the industry press. You can also find the official university press release here.
Journal of The Learning Sciences
A journal article based on my PhD research has now been published in the Journal of the Learning Sciences. The paper entitled “Motivating Children to Learn Effectively: Exploring the Value of Intrinsic Integration in Educational Games“ has taken over a full year to make it to print from the date it was initially accepted! It was written in collaboration with Shaaron Ainsworth at Nottingham University and provides empirical evidence for the value of taking a more “intrinsically integrated” approach to designing educational games. The results are based on a range of studies carried out using a purpose-built game called ”Zombie Division” in which children learnt mathematics by doing battle with skeletons in a dungeon-based action-adventure game.
More information and research links can be found here and here but final year students lucky enough to be taking my “Serious Games” module next year will be exposed to my theories relating to my research into intrinsic integration in some detail. To anyone considering the idea of integration I would suggest playing both Questionaught (commissioned by the BBC and nominated for a BAFTA) and the Typing of the Dead demo from SEGA. Now ask yourself which one is chocolate-covered broccoli?
03.11.11Unrealistic for Teaching
In recent years the Unreal engine has become a popular platform to use for student projects on game-based degrees. Here at Hallam it was used for a number of years on the interdisciplinary group-project module we run in the third year. I’ve taught Unreal programming on this module for two years now and I’m very pleased that we’ve decided to leave it behind next year. Earlier in the year I wrote an Editorial in which I talked about some of my reservations with Unreal. There’s no doubt that Unreal is an awe-inspiring game, and that the creators of the Unreal Engine are clearly brilliant programmers, but that’s really the problem. The analogy I make is that it’s a bit like giving students St. Pauls Cathedral to play with as a way of learning how to build houses. It may be technically amazing, but it’s far too overwhelming for inexperienced developers to fully appreciate what’s on offer. Moreover, the academic version of the engine doesn’t allow programmers to create new functionality from the ground up using C++, but forces them to derive functionality from a vast hierarchy of existing objects using UnrealScript instead. As a result many students spend most of their time giving the cathedral a new paint job, and working out how to move a few pillars around without really gaining any understanding of how they might build a cathedral of their own! I’m very much of the opinion that my students would learn far more building a bungalow from scratch than a cathedral based on the hard work of Epic’s programmers. Game engines may be a natural part of game development these days, but there has to be an option that provides a better balance between educational goals and impressive outcomes. The student’s are well aware that they only have a very superficial understanding of Unreal after working with it for a year and they’ve been telling us that in their feedback. Employers in the industry are also very aware that Unreal demos are too reliant on ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ and they’re telling us that in their feedback too—so it’s high time for a change.
So what approach should we be using instead? This year we had a talented group of MComp students who developed their own 2D platform game engine for the PSP and used it to make a game called BounceBack. They were doing this in parallel to groups that were developing games using Unreal, and this presented us with a dilemma in terms of assessment. The game they produced appears to be very basic in comparison to the Unreal games, but actually it demonstrated a far more sophisticated understanding of game development that is possible using Unreal. At the same time, the PSP approach gave much less scope for artistic students to stretch their creative talents as part of an interdisciplinary team. All this means it is almost impossible to compare the two quantitatively and we spent a lot of time deliberating over the marks awarded to the PSP group.
Although we’d certainly encourage similar groups of students to follow in the footsteps of the PSP group in the future—we know it’s not an approach that’s going to work for all groups. Few students are destined to be engine programmers and interdisciplinary teams need opportunities to demonstrate their talents, in game logic, artificial intelligence, scripting, level design, 3D modelling, animation etc. We need a game engine to be available to the students, but something which empowers them rather than limits them…
our search begins…
Steel Minions Game Studio
The Steel Minions game studio is a new venture here at Sheffield Hallam, and has only existed since the start of the year. It’s not a grand affair (comprising of just a single room), but it is a fully commercially licensed game studio. That means that we have commercial (rather than educational) licences for all the development software installed on the PCs within the studio and we have both PSP and PS3 development kits—just like commercial developers. We are also a licensed PlayStation minis developer all of which means that we can legally create titles for PSP platforms which can be bought and downloaded online from the PSN store.
Now that’s all very well, but why would we need such a thing? Of course we can dream, but it’s unlikely that we’re going to make a fortune for the university by coming up with the next Loco Roco or Patapon. Fortunately that’s not the point, and the idea is rather to provide students with “workplace simulation” in line with the recommendations of the Livingstone-Hope report. This means that we get students involved in the full development process of a game right from concept design through to the QA and submission process. This is something that is usually very difficult to achieve within the constraints of modular degrees which can only provide a very focussed window into the game development process. To many within the games industry, you’re not a professional game developer until you have experienced the full development cycle of a game—particularly the final process of bug-testing and submission. It’s in these final weeks of a project that your true colours are revealed and tensions between team members of different disciplines can run high. The ability to go the full distance with an interdisciplinary project and take it right through to completion is a real asset and (in my experience) not something that everyone has. This is why games companies advertise for applicants with one published title to their name—often even for junior positions. It reduces their risk of getting someone inappropriate for the industry, but it also saves them from having to carry an inexperienced member of staff at a difficult time in development.
When employers require a published title to get a job working on a published title, its only initiatives like this (and others like them) that can break that deadlock. And while I’m sure we’ll have both successes and failures along the way, there is no doubt that the students emerging from the studio will gain an enviable set of skills and experience that will help to distinguish them from other graduates in a competitive job market. we’ve got an exciting few years ahead of us and you’ll have to stay tuned to see what we get up to!
12.17.10Christmas Lecture 2010
Last week we held our Christmas lecture for students on our games-based courses. This was delivered by the game designers behind the downloadable Dr. Who adventure games. Charles Cecil (MD of Revolution Software) and Sean Millard (Creative Director of Sumo-Digital) addressed a packed lecture theatre as they provided a fascinating insight into the development of this mass market title. At the end of the lecture students got the chance to put their own questions to the pair before joining them for an informal chat over a mince pie.
However, Sean and Charles weren’t the only distinguished guests at the lecture, as we were greatly privileged to have Ian Stewart (the founder of Gremlin Graphics and currently MD of Urbanscan Ltd) attending the event as well. Gremlin was the games company which put Sheffield on the game development map in the 1980s and 1990s developing and publishing around 150 games for the platforms of the day. Gremlin are the reason Sheffield is still a hotbed of game development talent to this very day and Sumo-Digital is just one of the offspring companies created by former Gremlin employees (the original Core Design actually being another).
Ian attended as part of a series of exciting announcements we made at the lecture which have been covered quite a bit in the industry press.
- The FIRST announcement was that we will be running a competition to redesign Gremlin’s most successful gaming franchise: Zool. The competition is exclusively open to Sheffield Hallam’s students and will be judged by Ian Stewart and Sean Millard. Permission to use the Zool IP was granted by Urbanscan Ltd.
- The SECOND announcement was that the Christmas lecture marks the start of a closer relationship with Sumo-Digital, and to this end Sean Millard will be providing seminars on writing and pitching game designs to assist students entering the Zool competition.
- The THIRD announcement is that Sheffield Hallam have opened their very own mini game studio which is equipped with PSP development hardware. Our close relationship with Sony means that there is a real possibility of turning the Zool game design into an actual PSP Minis title in the future – so watch this space.
The university’s press release on all this can be found here.
The studio doesn’t have a name yet, but we hope to be able to announce more information on that front in the New Year as well as some pictures.
Have a great Christmas and New Year!
Jake