GAMES DEVELOPMENT

In the last 15 years the world has seen a massive increase in the amount of digital technology we use everyday, from work to entertainment. At the forefront of digital entertainment are computer games. In fact, computer games as an industry now makes more money than the Hollywood film industry. Because the industry continues to grow, so does the demand for talented people to work in it. With a view to this, the Dublin Oak Academy has just launched its new computer games development course. The course teaches the students a lot of core abilities which are applicable directly to games development, such as:

• Programming
• Gameplay Development
• Level Creation

But the course also aims to help the student learn some more valuable skills that are applicable to any job:

• Team Work
• Project Planning
• Meeting Deadlines
• Critical Thinking
• Algebraic Math
• Communicating Ideas
• Lateral Thinking
• Coordination of work
• Problem Solving
• Application of Maths learned in Math Class

With these new skills we hope to broaden the students future horizons and hopefully give them an insight into an industry many of them will have only seen from the outside.

The subject, which runs the entire length of the academic year, consists of learning how to program in the opening weeks and then building on these new skills in the following months by working on several group projects, in which each member of the team will at times work as:

• Programmer
• Project Leader
• Consultant
• Designer
• Artwork Creator

At the end of the year each student should have a working knowledge of:

• The C# Programming Language
• The Unity Game Engine

Those students who perform well in the subject throughout the year will be given the opportunity to sit the Microsoft Exam in Gaming Fundamentals.