A Day in my Life as a Game Design Student

Hey there, it's been a little while. School is is picking up speed and I am already having a bit of trouble getting to everything I want to. As homework actually kicks in (it's light now on day four), I will need to have some excellent time-management structures in place. For now, it all feels a little bit crazy.

Our classes are three-hours long and never start earlier than 9:00AM, which is pretty great since my commute is 45 minutes door-to-door (walk-train-walk). However, the bad news is that we are scheduled to regularly have classes until 9:30PM (next week we make up for the long weekend by being at school until 9:30PM every night, on three of those four days we start at 9:00AM. It's just the way it is.

Today's classes started with Game Production at 9:00AM. I've heard from one student that he felt that production was basically just common sense, but I disagree; learning to manage your time and understand workflows and pipelines, and above all being a good leader—these are the farthest things from common sense. It was just an introduction this morning, so nothing was mind-blowing, but I did enjoy the class and learn some stuff already.

Hit a nearby Chinese food place for lunch (this is Chinatown, and there are MANY places like this one to choose from). The food was so-so, the service was poor, and they screwed up our order on top of all of that. I won't be going back.

This afternoon we had Cinematics/Storyboarding, which most people would recognize as being disciplines straight from the film industry. I'm pretty excited about this class as designing cinematics would be a great career, and I expect to do fairly well with my background with scriptwriting and film analysis.

We had a couple of hours between classes, so a group of us went into one of our game rooms and played Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and Halo 3. Good times! I came to our class' computer lab to polish up some homework, and now I'm here writing this post, and it's class time in about 20 minutes.

This evening we have Analog Game Theory (board games, card games, etc.), which I am a little leery of. On our first day of classes we had a double-block of this, so we basically played Diplomacy as a class for five–six hours. I'll hold my opinions for now since it's so early, but I'm not quite convinced that was a good use of our time, and this education is too expensive to waste a single minute.

I'll get home tonight around 10:30PM, and tomorrow it'll all start again.

More later. Class time.