This article is part of the Get Into Games feature presentation. Check out the rest of the series for a complete look into the reality of getting a gaming career, as told to us by some of the industry’s best talent.

Jason Colman is the head lecturer of Qantm’s Game Design and Development course, a one-year diploma designed to prime students of mixed experience for entry-level positions. We asked him to teach us the basics.

What did you do before Qantm?

I’ve been a C++ programmer since ’96. I’d worked in lots of industries but I always loved games programming, and started my own business selling shareware games. Then I started working as a games programmer at a company called Ideaworks3D. They’re quite well regarded, I think – they do ports for mobile phones of games like Final Fantasy VII: Dirge Of Cerberus and PGR3. Then the opportunity to teach at Qantm turned up. The thing I’d always liked as a programmer was being able to teach people, and having been a programmer for a number of years I decided to jump in. I hadn’t had any formal teacher training or anything but I love it.

What’s your range of students like?

It ranges from school-leavers to people in their mid-30s, a couple in their 40s. It’s people who want to get a career in the games industry, some who want a change of career. Most of them really love games but haven’t had any experience programming. So we’ve gone from first principles with a lot of the students this year; because we’re a small place we can be very flexible.

How do you ensure that newcomers get the training they need while no one is held back?

We actually split it into two classes, one being a C++ boot camp while the other’s for people who’ve done stuff like Flash or Actionscript already.

Do you use much middleware?

The games people write are obviously quite simple – they have to be small in scope because I want them to do finished games rather than something that’s too ambitious. The idea of the course is for them to build up this portfolio they can use to get into the industry. So we don’t use middleware as far as possible because we want to understand exactly what’s going on. We use the odd library like SDL – that’s good for getting started. But we try to write all the code ourselves as far as possible. Maybe we’ll look at middleware in the future.

Do you recognise a need for general skills rather than specialised ones?

We have the modular stuff for the course, obviously, but it’s basically split in two. We do concentrate on C++ because we want students to be employable. It’s why we don’t use Java or anything like that. So we do that but we also do a kind of general software practice. Once the students are past the C++ crash course we have two modules: Games Programming and Games Systems Design. The latter’s more generally applicable software engineering like design patterns, general object-oriented design and well-known solutions to common problems.

How long is the course?

The diploma is one year split into three trimesters, each of 12 weeks with a week at the end called project week where the students give presentations and sit exams. We hope the students are employable at junior entry-level positions by the end of the year – I suppose it depends on how much effort they put in on their portfolios. The idea is that they’ll have a couple of 2D arcade games and a clutch of 3D demos. It would be asking quite a lot to ask for full 3D games.

What we like to encourage is for them to work as a team. We started this course in January and the fastest students have just finished – they were the ones who’d already done some programming. And we also run a 3D animation course. What was nice is that one of the programmers collaborated with a couple of 3D animators from that other course.

How much is this a learning experience for you as well as them?

That’s kind of a concern for me, actually. I’m not in the industry any more – how am I going to keep up? Luckily, I’m always being dragged off to things like XNA Gamefest. And the other aspect, of course, is that I’m also learning how to be a teacher. So the students are learning how to do my job while I’m learning to teach them – it’s kinda fun.

Are new models like XNA something you’re trying to exploit?

I’m very wary of things like getting the students to do C# – it doesn’t make them very employable. But we do these workshops that are open to anyone, and we’ve been using Visual Studio Express for those. They’ve got this thing called DarkGDK which is written by The Games Creators, the guys who do FPS Creator. It’s completely open to people who can just walk in off the street – they don’t have to enroll in college. What I’ve found is that Dark gets people up and running with making games very quickly. And it’s a free download, so there’s absolutely nothing stopping you getting into making games for free. XNA could be one of those things we also do workshops on.