When I told my parents that I wanted to fly to the other side of the country to attend a game design course, I expected many things to happen. I expected confused looks, raised voices, and a million reasons hurled at me why it was not the right direction for my life. Of those expected reactions, I received none. Instead, my parents looked at me like I had made the most ingenious statement of my life, and my mom replied, “Great!” Perhaps they wanted to get rid of me, or perhaps they were sick and tired of me bouncing around aimlessly, using up university tuition, but my parents offered me all the support I needed to attend the course of my choosing.
The students informed me of a couple pitfalls of the school, but they offered nothing that proved to be a deal-breaker.
I began my journey by committing to a month of research. Quickly, very quickly, VFS became a stand out choice for game design courses within Canada, so I instead turned to scouring the web looking for any reason NOT to attend the Vancouver Film School. It had glowing reviews from past students, but I was wary that perhaps alumni reviews were written for personal reasons instead of the truth, so instead I contacted a few current “GD” students. The students informed me of a couple pitfalls of the school, but they offered nothing that proved to be a deal-breaker.
After this month, I contacted admissions and informed them of my intent to join the Game Design course. I was linked to an application webpage that included an entrance essay and design challenge which were supposed to gauge my ability to complete the course successfully. I spent a week completing the two requirement pieces and was quickly accepted. Later on that week I received a “special” letter from the director of admissions congratulating me on my acceptance and the “remarkable admissions pieces” I had submitted. During the year I realized that everyone had received such a “special” email. The ruse, it seems, had started before I had even signed up as a student.
VFS is not a Charity, it is a Business
Without even mentioning the Game Design course at VFS, it would first be prudent to talk about the school as a whole. The Vancouver Film School is not funded by the government like our illustrious semi-public universities in Canada, and because of that, it does not have the luxuries that those schools enjoy. VFS cannot pick and choose its enrolling students when admissions are low, and still, the school must meet class size quotas per term. This means, that when admissions are low, the flood gates seem to be open. The school will use grants as a marketing ploy and utilize them to meet admissions numbers; instead of rewarding stellar admission qualities or legitimate need. When applying, I would hold off on accepting admission or signing ANY kind of paperwork until you have haggled down the tuition price down as low as you can possibly get it. The administrators will NOT be forthright in informing you of their bursary practices and standards, so the ball is in your court to persuade them to lower the tuition cost.
Although your “advisor” will seem friendly enough, their job is to get you through the doors at VFS.
Although your “advisor” will seem friendly enough, their job is to get you through the doors at VFS. They are car salesman by another name, and you should approach your relationship with them as such. Demand information about bursaries, the status of other students that will be in your intake, and the status of the teachers within the curriculum. Ignore cries of “limited time” and “down to the wire” acceptance deadlines; this is your future you’re purchasing here, not a rotisserie oven.
If you receive positive information about your intake at the Vancouver Film School and decide to accept their terms of acceptance you best start saving your pennies. You won’t be able to work for a year, and you can’t afford to have money troubles rear up half way through a busy year of learning.
The cost of a certificate program at VFS is very high, perhaps too high to justify for some people and if nothing else, it should serve as a barrier of your commitment to the VFS experience. This school is about to change your life in a number of dramatic and profound ways, and it is crucial that you have all of the information you need before submitting to such a change.
The Game Design Curriculum
The Game design course is broken into two distinct parts, five terms of classes, followed by three terms of final project production.
The actual learning portion of the course is comprised of five terms with a few extra classes spilling into the final project production portion (alliteration!) of the course. Each term is six weeks long and is capped with a small period of respite. Every term is broken up into six to eight classes, with each class spanning 2.5 hours in length, two to three classes per day. For every hour of class, expect another hour to cover the course work, and expect to invest even more time above that to produce GREAT work.
Classes range from beginners 3D modeling and motion capture to game design document creation and “level design.” If you are open to the experience, you will learn more than you ever thought possible, and in some cases, actually becomes proficient in the skills being taught. A current breakdown of the curriculum can be found on the VFS site here and makes any further breakdown of it redundant.
The Classes
Asset Production
Roughly half of the courses offered within the Game Design Course focus wholly on the creation of assets used within a video game product. These asset production classes include: 3D modeling, 2D art, Pixel Art, Front End U.I, Digital Art design (Photoshop skills), Scripting, Audio Asset creation, Game Design Documentation, Storytelling, and Machinema.
A student will leave these courses with the most basic knowledge to knock out these assets for any student project. Theory was barely touched on within these classes, and for most part felt like students who wanted to excel in these areas had to do so under their own steam. Clearly with the short amount of time allotted for these subjects, an average student will not develop the necessary skills to step into these roles within a professional studio, and I doubt that this was ever the intent. The purpose of a student dabbling with the creation pipeline of these assets is to make them aware of the difficulties and possible roadblocks involved in their creation. This will hopefully allow a game design student to communicate more effectively with the artists and designers responsible for creating these assets in said student’s projects and in projects beyond.
Design Theory/Application
Actual Design courses comprised roughly one fourth of a term’s course load. These courses include: Analog Game Theory, Game Design Theory, Level Design and Interactive Storytelling among others. Again, these courses were introductory level and rarely dipped into any heavy design. I found myself doing more asset production than actual thinking for design assignments, and the feedback I received, except that from early semester teachers, was rarely focused on design itself but on the format of the assignment deliverables. Those that wanted to dive into the theory of game design cracked open the assigned reading materials, and those that didn’t, well, they probably sold their text books to pawn shops around the greater Vancouver area.
Soft Skills
Sporadically showing up without invitation were the assorted soft skill courses which included: presentation skills, team management, and an untimely job preparation course. Due to the limited amount of time devoted to these subjects, again, what you will learn is introductory. Most of the time spent in these classes will feel like a waste of time if you have the most basic of common sense; which you hopefully do. There is definitely some value to glean from these courses, but at the time, they will be the last thing you’re worried about and their effectiveness is diminished because of this.
Conclusion
The majority of teachers that I had at VFS tried their very best to teach their subject with the time allotted to them. Each class had a varied level of effectiveness due to the difficulty of the subject, the enthusiasm of the class to learn the subject, and the quality of the teaching materials left for the teacher to use. Some subjects fit well into segmented chunks and were learnable over a short period of time; while some subjects were taught in a barebones manner and failed to provide the necessary tutelage to gain any sort of master of the subject.
Most classes felt necessary, and those that clearly were not, simply became write-offs for most of the students and mutated into scheduled detention.
Fortunately, our intake was blessed with some outstanding teachers who made a tremendous impact on my experience in the course. Their passion and dedication to their subject was almost tangible, and I have grown as a designer and as a collaborative team member because of them.
Unfortunately, not all of the teachers at VFS had the students’ interest in heart, and were clearly there to collect a paycheck. My class had two teachers who were absolute disasters. One of them was replaced after the other class representative and I complained on multiple occasions about her complete inability to teach our class. The other teacher was not let go, but was in fact employed at the school for two more semesters, and four more entire classes. His teaching style was, and this is not being over dramatic, to sit in a chair and read off slides for subjects he had very little, if any experience with. This teacher provided no feedback, and when asked to go in depth on his subject would find any excuse not to, the most common being; “That’s not important.” This teacher had a very real impact on our education. Our complaints were not only ignored, but treated with a subtle hostility that made us wary of walking the fine line between being a paying client of VFS, out to get our monies worth, and leaving with the good graces of our administrators.
Making a Game
The first six months of classes within the VFS game design course culminate in a student led/created mod or game. The breakup of the class into teams is a largely democratic event, and the student groups are let loose on themselves to create a game in a little over 5 months. I don’t know how prepared the program made me for the game making experience; or how unprepared I would have been without it, but the benchmarks the school put forth for our adventure seriously propelled us forward. The working environment at VFS was certainly not the most ideal for our crew, so most of us worked from home for good chunks of the experience, especially nearing the end. Try sitting in an aged, broken VFS chair for 12 hours and you will feel the pain that most of us did.
After the months of classes crawl by, the game production portion of the course will fly by within moments. Luckily my class had quite a few talented individuals and I was lucky enough to buddy up with four of them to make a successful student game. We did things our way, and we were proud that we were responsible enough to keep our own production in check. Some VFS mentors offered us some great advice, others simply wasted our time (luckily we had a great project manager who shielded us from their babbling) but they all provided us with even more determination to succeed.
In the end, we arrived at our industry presentation night with a game that we could all be proud to have worked on.
In the end, we arrived at our industry presentation night with a game that we could all be proud to have worked on. It helped us all obtain jobs within the industry within the first two months after graduation; and even landed us an Elan award for Best Student Game for that year.
One might think that I owe the school a lot for my success; but I would rather attribute that success to my amazing team mates, my mentors, and the game design staff.
You Cannot Teach “Determination”
Those who succeed at VFS do so under their own steam. After the obligatory compliments and hugs fade away, each student will be left with a year of accomplishment or failure: A portfolio filled with rich potential, or one that appears to have been thrown together during a bus ride to school. In my opinion, this is the main reason to remain hopeful about a VFS student. The fact will remain constant that it will always be in the student’s hands to take advantage of the facilities and the faculty ever circling them. A student leaving the course has either just spent a year growing as a designer/a facilitator of designers; or becoming better at Left 4 Dead. Because of the freedom within the course, and the fact that marks mean very little, not every student graduating from the VFS Game Design course will be industry ready. But this freedom fuels incredible creations for final projects, and allows students to race and push each other, which may be an acceptable trade off.
Sink or Swim
In the end, my experience at Vancouver Film School was a success because I had forced it to be one. So in life, the difference between a success and a failure is the amount of spit, grit and determination that turns the latter into the former. My good fortune brought together four incredible team mates to collaborate with and some amazing teachers who truly cared about their students’ success. Life also chanced me with a few teachers who were rotten apples and an administration in-able or unwilling (both are inexcusable) to enact any real change over our learning environment. I wouldn’t say that this is a situation unique to the Vancouver Film School alone, but that doesn’t make it any less inexcusable.
No, but I also would not recommend against it either.
Do I recommend VFS?
No, but I also would not recommend against it either. I have heard horror stories from students that have graduated from other design schools; and while I feel that my experience at VFS was not perfect, it was not the terrible mess that others seem to be.
What I would recommend, is due diligence. Visit the campus, if you can, talk to currently enrolled students, and compare their experiences to those at other schools. Find out which students have arrived at success post graduation, and which students have not; and most importantly, why?
A fifteen minute Google search is not enough time to adequately chart your course through life, so take the time before you choose a school seriously, and find the right place for you. I won’t make a suggestion for or against the Vancouver Film School Game Design course, because it is always changing, and to do so would be to betray the entire message of this review.
Discover your own path, and fight to discover the reality behind each school’s PR machine by asking current students for their unfiltered opinions. Ask a current student out for lunch and pick his/her brain. Offer to meet them for coffee and have a list of questions ready that you really need to have answered. Take the time to do the leg work, find the right school for you, and make sure every dollar you invest in your education is used as wisely as it could have been.
This is the worst time for you to be lazy or complacent; many bad schools are hoping that you will be just that in order to fill their admission quotas.
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Mike Wilson
Tyree Alleyne GD13
Jeannie
As a current GD student, coming straight out of highschool.
I really wish i had seen this and the other article before i had dropped my 30 grand on this course, because so far the education it has given me has been a complete joke. With most of the stuff I had been ‘taught’ I either knew from the gaming/mod community already, or could have learned from googling UT3/3Ds Max tutorials. In these last few weeks as a few mentors have come in, I have probably learned as much, if not more than the entire 4 terms leading up to that moment…Thanks VFS.