Designing and Creating Games
At VFS, you don't just think about games – you create them. It's as simple as that. During your year, you conceptualize, develop, and produce at least two major game projects, in addition to several smaller projects like board games.
These major projects mean learning the intricacies of game production: game art, 3D, interfaces, scripting, and game audio. Because you work in an environment modeled after real game studios, you develop a thorough understanding of team and project management: how to get the most out of yourself and your collaborators, how to meet every deadline, prototype quickly, and best manage your resources.
The Flash Game and Final Game projects enable you to experience the entire design process and development pipeline and provide an immediate, practical vehicle for everything you learn in your year.
Flash Game
Before you embark on the design and development of your final project, you work within a small team to create a game using the popular, powerful Flash platform. This game gives you the chance to get your hands dirty: to experience the process of developing and releasing a game on a smaller scale than what's still to come.
Spotlight: Detailed Design Documents
A detailed design document is something of a game design bible, a living document you create beginning at the pre-production stage that will help formalize the design and keep every person involved in its development in perfect sync. By the time your final game ships, you'll have an impressive document accounting for every design decision, art asset, and inspiration that went into its making.
Download the Detailed Design Document for the student game 'Gravitos'
Final Game
The highlight of your year and the crowning achievement of your portfolio: that's what you create during the final two terms of your year in Game Design. Over a 12-week development cycle, plus 8 weeks of pre-production, the program ratchets up the intensity as you and your small team live and breathe the development of your final game.
It could be anything from an innovative first-person shooter or a browser-based puzzle game – what matters is the process and the results. You'll be mentored by industry professionals as you conceive, design, refine, and prepare your game for release. You'll manage your game's scope and engage in ongoing play-testing to make sure the final product is as polished as it can be. Finally, you'll release it to the world - and to an industry eager to see what you can do.
