Game Design Major
At Champlain you'll hone your ability to first concept a game, and then design it, and then produce it fully in a collaborative team-based production in the Game Studio.
Why Game Design?
Who designs the gameplay for the next blockbuster title?
Who builds the worlds and crafts the challenges that will immerse players in new worlds?
Who tells the stories and develops the characters that will keep players in their seats until the very end?
These are the areas of expertise for Game Designers. Equal parts creative and analytical, people who pursue the Game Design major have a passion for imagining, planning, and building the unique world of a game experience.
Game designers create the spaces, tell the stories, build the levels and design the playing experiences that define today's digital gaming environments. As a graduate with a degree in Game Design, you can spend your career playing while you work in an industry in which fun is serious business.
In 2008, the computer and video game industry hit revenues of $11.9 billion, an impressive $2.4 billion in growth in a single year. Think of it this way: game sales have tripled since 1996, and data from the Entertainment Software Association suggests that 63 percent of all Americans play video gam
Why Game Design at Champlain?
Game design comprises three discrete areas of the game production process:
- system design, which creates the foundational logic and mechanical plan of how a game operates and builds the tools to make the world of the game happen
- level design, which creates the experiential effects and determines and organizes the parameters of play on each level of the world created for the game
- narrative design, which develops the story, dialogue and characters, and creates the integrated plan for how each works within the game world. When it comes to teaching students to excel in these complex, interdependent pieces of the game production cycle, no other institution’s curriculum is set up as well as Champlain’s.
As a Game Design major at Champlain, you experience a four-year curriculum in which you work side by side with game artists, other game designers, programmers and producers to construct full games. Modeled after real game studios and how they operate in the industry, Champlain’s Game Studio teaches you the critical soft skills and discipline that game industry employers are looking for.
Meanwhile, you’ll be developing extensive game design skills in your area of interest and building an impressive portfolio of collaborative work that will help you land that first job. The unmatched combination of emphases on creative, aesthetic, technical and professional skills that the Game Design major offers is why GamePro magazine identifies Champlain’s program as one of the top 10 undergraduate programs in the United States in video game design. ADMISSION PREREQUISITE: PORTFOLIO REVIEW
- Collaborate in Champlain's Game Studio. Work with other students who major in Game Art & Animation, Game Programming and The Management of Creative Media to build games from start to finish. The Game Studio model replicates a professional game development setting and will give you students a superior understanding of how creative teams work together to develop game assets and pull them together into a functional product.
- Practice using state-of-the-art technology resources at Champlain’s new, cutting-edge multimedia, 3D art and game production labs.
- Present your finished games at the Annual Game Development Senior Show, attended by recruiters from companies such as 1st Playable, 38 Studios, Gameloft Montreal, Gameloft New York, the Haywire Group and Turbine.
- Study on our campus in Montreal, Canada, the second-largest game development center in the world and home to two of its largest game development firms, Electronic Arts and Ubisoft—just 90 miles north of our Burlington, Vermont, campus.
- Work in a paid position at Champlain's acclaimed Emergent Media Center, and use these real-world projects to develop both practical experience and invaluable industry contacts.
- Make crucial connections in the industry before you even graduate through networking with adjunct faculty, guest speakers and industry professionals from Champlain partners like Artificial Mind and Movement (A2M), Electronic Arts, Cryptic Studios and America’s Army
Ask a Question about our Game Design Degree Program
Ask a question, and someone from our Admission team will put you in touch with the faculty or staff member who can best answer your questions.
A realistic rendering of a dinosaur for a game design class