Computer Games Programming

Some years ago, I was studying Computer Games Programming at the University of Derby. But did I learn anything from it?

It was around 2008 when I had all but accepted my fate that a future as a writer wouldn't work out for me. The pay is poor, especially for the amount of research I was putting in. By this time, I had been published in the award winning video games magazine gamesTM, and for the four weeks or so mulling over old magazines to research a four or six page article was a good indication that it wasn't paying any of the main bills. Of course, for the time researching, I could have written many more pages, but even at the page rate, it still wasn't fantastic pay. So I feel for many writers out there. If you have a full time job and you can write on the side then this is ideal. If you can get a full time job as a staffer, then this is probably the next best thing, and of course then, do well and you have the prospect of career progression. But being freelance only is tough. I know. I did it for 12 years of my life.

So, I needed a change in career, as the two things that I liked doing, writing and being a support worker for vulnerable adults, are poorly paid, although in different ways could be highly rewarding. What else could I do? Well, I have written and reviewed video games, albeit not the modern days entertainment software. But I think I got fairly good at opining at least. I was also a keen programmer in the 1980s and some of the 1990s. So that was it, I would venture into a Computer Science course of some description with an eye on making computer games happen inside of television screens.

I actually started out on a course run by Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), and the language of choice was something called Java, a perfectly reasonable, if clunky, language. But this was the time of the ill-fated ConDem Government, which oddly decided upon some Trotskyite policies without even knowing it. Anyway, for those of us old enough to remember, there was an entirely unnecessary "emergency budget" which cut around £6bn from public expenditure, and a significant sum from Higher Education. You know, because the best way out of a recession is not to educate people to fulfil their potential, isn't it?

These cuts affected the course that I was on, because I wasn't attending a prestigious Red Brick University, I suppose. Firstly, the number of places for the second year was cut, which meant that some people who managed to pass the first year did not have a place on the second year. Luckily, I wasn't one of them somehow. But I can only imagine trying to get a job with only one year at University whilst trying to explain that I didn't just drop out. Further to these "efficiency savings" was that the third year was no longer available to us, so that meant we had to leave with 2/3rds of a Degree. But there was hope in that we could apply to other Universities in the hope that they would accept us. So, what could I do?

The degree programme at MMU was basically Computer Science focussed, but with business studies covering half of the course. And whilst I did very well at the Business aspects, I still favoured the programming side of things. I didn't want to be a manager in some soulless IT enterprise, I wanted to make some softwares. I therefore applied to the third year of the Games Programming Degree Programme at the University of Derby. But going from one institution to another isn't really how Universities work, as I found out.

After some negotiations with the head of the course at the University of Derby, I was offered a place on the 2nd year, and this meant that my planned three years of study was actually going to be five, as the course has one year in placement before the final year, and everyone has to complete the year in placement. As you can imagine, after budgeting to be a student again for three years, this was going to be extra tough, and I was going to miss yet more years of my favourite daughter's life for this, who was a toddler when I started at Derby.

Well, the 2nd year was pretty intense. Obviously, I was new, everyone else knew each other. The timetable was confusing at first. And my mathematics wasn't very good either. I mean, not bad, but just not 3D programming good. There were some aspects of the course I really did enjoy. The MIPs assembly was actually pretty easy, to my surprise, but then we were only making pixels happen in MIPs. I made a fairly basic but good enough 2D drawing API. Everything else I struggled with until I happened upon C programming for the Sony PSP. At last, there's a high level language that I could understand! It just seemed to make sense.

Sadly, it was my lack of trigonometry that let me down in the end, aside from the external pressures of family life and such like. So just before the final exams of the 2nd year I had to drop out for real. Luckily, I had learnt a lot about programming in the meantime, much more than the entire two years at MMU. Games programmers, it seemed to me, were the sort of people that obsess over making something interactive, intuitive and fun for another human. I mean, you wouldn't play any games that aren't any of those things, would you?

So, although I was not successful, I did manage to make some games type stuff happen, and with the beautiful language of C, I had a way into the industry. I found an internship at a local Birmingham start up called MetApps, and a year after, I landed my first development job. And whilst I still love programming, today I am working on fairly necessary but stale service driven applications. What I want to do is to take my programming knowledge and apply it to something outside of my usual day job. My friend Andrew Owen suggests that I write the first game specifically for the Chloe 280SE. I guess I could dust off the Z80 Tutorials that have proven popular on this blog and see how far that gets me. The good news is that I could use C wrappers around Z80 if I wanted to, like I did with some of my ZX80 and ZX81 games.

I'm sure a tutorial about actually making a game would be an interesting read to many, at least my statistics for this blog are strongly suggesting this. Those people of my age or older may remember the excellent Input magazines, which taught programming for all platforms. I'd love to recreate something similar to that but more focussed on making a game.