IGAD Breda Is A Game Design School Like No Other

Today Kevin and I (Maikel) traveled to Breda, an old town in the Netherlands; we had been invited by a teacher from a school there to have a look around. After battling a windy and rainy day on my motorbike with Kevin holding on for dear life, we arrived at the NHTV International University of Applied Sciences. A branch of this University is called IGAD, which stands for International Game Architecture and Design, and it is at this department of the NHTV that the teacher Stefano Gualeni lectures. When we arrived,  Stefano was eagerly waiting to give us our tour of the faculty.

The tour began in the teacher’s office, where Stefano first revealed to us the driving force of the IGAD course. The course is among the first to have a teaching staff made up almost entirely of highly experienced professionals who came straight out of the gaming industry themselves, and were active in the industry for at least 10 years. Among the staff, there are teachers who have worked for companies from Intel to Square to Rare, and many more. Their room was divided into four rows, each row intended for teachers with specialties ranging from programming to art and design.

When exploring the rest of the building, we began with the first year students. These were the lucky few that actually got into the course, overcoming the strict intake procedures practiced at the school. Of the six hundred plus students that apply for this education every year, only a few get personally selected and find their place at the school.

The first year at IGAD will quickly throw you into the same environment many developers experience each and every day. Without any warning you will be thrown into Maya (a 3D modeling tool used in many game development companies), you will be drawing, painting and sculpting models manually, and before you know it, you are quickly approaching your first deadlines. In another class, Gamelab, you will be working with a small group of students to create your own small game from the things you have learned in the first few weeks of the course.

The school does have many drop outs, but most of the time it’s because the students can’t handle the high amount of time they have to invest into learning and getting their projects to succeed, since you will be spending hours upon hours on your project after school to get it all done before the deadline (several students even reported that they sometimes have to skip sleep for a night or two). “Pressure is always high since students have to get used to these environments, ” says Stefano, “since when they want to work in the gaming industry you have to get used making long hours under high pressure of a deadline”

Nevertheless, many students accept all of this, as one of them said,

“Seven weeks ago I came here and basically knew nothing even when I have been gaming all my life. But now I am already creating a game, and that amazes me and is really paying off all the efforts for me”

Another student said,

“Ever since I started here I got to learn so many skills I even didn’t know I had in me. Also, it is so cool to have teachers that have been working in the industry themselves. Now I know why it’s so important to invest a few extra hours of sleep just to finish our projects, although our art teacher says that we do need to sleep more to become more creative *laughing*”

While we were talking with the first year students, Stefano asked them to show off some of their projects.  Although some were pretty basic,  you could seen the enthusiasm in their eyes;  sometimes they even appeared quite proud of their achievements.

Stefano took us to the Drawing Room with the teacher Martin Beresford, who is the lecturer of drawing skills, a class where the students were working with all kinds of plastic models, drawing them to learn to look at objects in other ways. In the drawing skills course, the subjects of the students’ drawings can be almost anything from industrial to biological. They even have live models.

Jacco Bikker

Leaving the classroom behind with the students and their little model airplanes, we went back to the teacher’s office where we had a meeting with one of the handful of Dutch teachers the school has: Jacco Bikker (head of the programming department). Jacco started his programming career as a hobby and eventually ended up at Intel reprogramming and modifying the processing speeds.  For some reason, we started to talk about spare time and what effect this has on his free time and family life. Since he is a father of 3 children and is happily married, he did have to do some serious juggling with his work, hobby and spare time, eventually ending up in his own “nerd cave” (a small room downstairs in his home) where he can work and at the same time spend time with his family. Working at IGAD gave him some extra time to spend with his family.

Next up was our very own Chris McEntee, who seems to have really grown a lot since I last heard him speaking about his work. To me, it looks like he found his real talent as he had shown me a few things he had made for a recent animation assignment. If you want to know more about Chris and his gaming education at IGAD just click here as we go along to our final interview.

Finally, Stefano had set us up with Marcello Gomez Maureira, who is currently working on the most promising project at IGAD,  according to Stefano.  The game Hearfest is a game where you wake up as a bat and learn new abilities from scent,  smell and, naturally, sonar. We talked about how difficult it is to work in a big team of students and how they cooperated with each other even if one is holding the team back. He told me that he doesn’t like to kick people off of his team, but the teachers did say that if it causes problems you really should unless there is any other way. The game still looked really rough around the edges and it had a lot of room for improvement. Still, we can’t judge unfinished work, and we believe that with some love for the project and some devotion, this game might just win a prize in an upcoming competition.

…and with that I’m signing out.