I know life can be frustrating when things don’t work out as you want, but what I can tell you is following story:
I am 32 years old (almost) with 14 I wanted to be in the games industry, but my parents felt IT is something which works more out and you can earn much more money. 14 years later I decided to start studying game design and built a small studio back in Switzerland. But I will never regret in between, that I actually didn’t start out to be part of the games industry, but explored my life experience in other areas.
My point is, try to find resources to learn what you want to learn, and it will be never to late. Evaluate what your University will give you for live, but at the same time, look for alternatives that provide you with that knowledge. Create a game in UE4. Show it to the community and make another one. Fill your portfolio with great things.
And last but not least, create than a game. As simple as possible. Give yourself a success. This is for you to grow, not to make a hit. After that iterate and make something new. And lastly if you feel like it, join a team in the UE4 Community: https://forums.unrealengine.com/forumdisplay.php?25-Got-Skills-Looking-for-Talent
So I’m quite frustrated with my university. About a year ago I pushed for a class in game development. It was around the time when UE4 was announced to be free for education. I emailed my adviser and the dean of the college of Arts and Sciences. They brought it up in the a couple of department meetings (also do note that the CS sub-department was in talks to move to the Physics department from the Math department).
So at the end of last semester, my adviser announced there would be a “Game Design” class. It’s titled CSCI: Problems - Computer Graphics. The class is a little interesting as we are doing everything in OpenGL and WebGL. But all we have done so far is small animations, a line segment painter, layers, and we talked once about camera angles. I get it, sure it’s good to know the foundation of animation and game engines. But the fact is it will wasn’t relevant enough to what we were discussing. We will actually only barely delve into user input and dynamics. In-fact we had quite a bit of trouble even starting the class as it took 3 weeks for everyone to get OpenGL projects to compile on our personal computers. And we have a semester project that we had to come up with a proposal of what we were going to do. It was due two weeks ago and all of us bs’d it and are going with a 2D platformer because we can at least create one level. We’ve barely learned anything yet. And hopefully by then we’ll learn how to use external textures.
So I’m paying for a class that basically is an elective and not getting much out of it. Just basics of OpenGL.
I could rant on and on how dissapointing the CS department is at my school. Most CS students only go to work using their emphasis, mines networking, I’m going for my CCNP.
But it has been my dream for a long time to try and make games. I have so many creative ideas and I don’t get to fuel them into a project because I get stumped on something simple within any game engine. All because I’ve never been taught.
[END RANT]
So my question is, what’s the best plan of action in a situation like this? Wait till I graduate and go to school somewhere else to take game design classes? It frustrates me so much that I have to keep asking noob questions on the answers site and wait 12 hours to get an answer back on how to do something so simple.