Friday marked the final class of our video game development program at the college. Technically, the program disappeared from the website in 2024, but the final cohort quietly finished this past Friday so it felt like the right moment to write this.

From January 2011 to March 2015 (and to a lesser degree until July 2018), I was responsible for the faculty and operations behind our video game programs. During that time I learned a lot about education, students, game development, and motivation. This post is a reflection on that experience!

First, some background

Back in 2009, I was the faculty head for our IT programs. Around that time, the college launched a video game development program. The idea was great but the execution needed some work.

The program launched quickly and enrolled many students across multiple campuses, but the supporting infrastructure struggled to keep up. It was my understanding that it was a stressful launch for everyone involved and at one point the college was considering shutting the program down entirely. Instead, the CEO decided to give me the opportunity to try to stabilize it. The reasoning, as it was explained to me at the time, was something like: “Let’s give it to Jason. If anyone can fix it, it’s him.” As someone who loves to stay out of their comfort zone and is always willing to tackle a challenge, I was immediately on board.

At the same time, our software development programs were also undergoing improvements, so I was given responsibility for IT, software development, and video game development programs under a brand-new title: Dean of Technology (I still have that title).

Diving in!

My first step was simple: listen. I spent a lot of time speaking with instructors and students to understand what was working and what wasn’t, and then started making changes.

Fortunately, there were already some strong foundations. The program structure itself was actually quite solid. It had been designed by someone who had previously built game development programs at other colleges, and it showed. Students learned strong fundamentals: C++, more C++, math, and physics, followed by more specialized courses such as XNA, DirectX, and Unity (and much later, Unreal). There were even a splattering of supporting courses like level design.

Another clever decision by the original designer was including an Alienware laptop as part of the tuition. Yes, the same Alienware laptops you probably remember from The Big Bang Theory. This turned out to be brilliant for two reasons:

1. Students had hardware powerful enough to actually build games.
2. It gave the program immediate credibility with prospective students.

If you want to attract aspiring game developers (most of whom are hardcore gamers that know the industry well), giving them a high-end gaming laptop sends a pretty clear signal that you take the program seriously. And yes, it can run Crysis.

The faculty I inherited was also extremely strong. Many instructors were experts in specific areas of the curriculum, and several were industry veterans who had worked on some impressive titles… exactly the kind of mentors students want. The biggest challenge was that the group hadn’t quite gelled as a team yet. No, sorry… that’s a complete understatement and I feel ashamed to have typed it. The group was at each other’s throats like players in a free-for-all deathmatch. Personality clashes galore alongside very different competing approaches to curriculum.

So, I focused on getting the team collaborating towards common goals, and assigned ownership of key parts of our curriculum to certain instructors to maintain and upgrade. Just like software teams, once everyone started pulling in the same direction, things improved dramatically.

Building my own credibility

One small challenge I faced personally: while I was a senior software developer, I wasn’t technically a game developer. That matters in a game program. Both students and instructors care about that distinction. And aside from a brief skunkworks project involving Capcom while I was at the University of Waterloo, I didn’t have much game industry experience. So I decided to fix that, and quickly.

Through networking at a Toronto event, I connected with a small game studio in California that needed help. Their Android Solitaire game had suddenly become popular and their only developer had abruptly left to return to Russia two days prior. So I joined remotely and took over development. The game needed some architectural work and a few gameplay improvements, so I rebuilt parts of the system and added some engagement mechanics using user-profiling techniques. The result? It eventually became the #1 Solitaire game on the Android Market (later the Google Play Store)!

I always thought that was fitting, since I was essentially the solo developer on a game called Solitaire. The branding practically wrote itself. And more importantly, the faculty knew and appreciated how much work is involved when you’re the solo developer on any game project.

Enter the competitions!

As I was stabilizing the program, I knew that I needed to focus on competitions. Game development competitions were becoming extremely popular in Ontario, and our students were already attending events like the Global Game Jam and Toronto Game Jam… but I wanted to go further.

In 2011 we hosted the Great Canadian Appathon at our Toronto campus. From 2012 to 2015, I coordinated many more events at our Kitchener campus, including the Great Canadian Appathon and multiple Microsoft Gameathons/Hackathons. These events were typically 48-hour competitions where students worked non-stop to build a playable game or app.

They were exhausting to organize (yes, exhausting!). The campus had to remain open and staffed the entire time, logistics were complicated, and sleep schedules went out the window. But they were also incredible.

Sponsors provided food, drinks, prizes, and swag. Energy drink companies supplied more caffeine than any human should reasonably consume (I even put caffeinated soap in the washrooms). Food sponsors ranged from catered meals to several thousand dollars in McDonald’s gift cards (the Kitchener campus had a McDonalds in it). Microsoft even paid for a private shuttle bus to transport students from our GTA campuses to Kitchener. At one point I became concerned that students were eating too much junk food so I placed baskets of fruit and bran muffins in the common area. But they were treated like unwelcome foreign objects that had somehow wandered into a junk food ecosystem. I didn’t repeat that mistake again.

The prizes were serious: $$$, Xbox consoles, Windows Phones, prepaid Visa cards, and piles of developer swag. I’m fairly certain I still have a box somewhere full of Microsoft DreamSpark plush monkey slingshots that screeched when flung.

But most importantly, students loved these events. Many later told me the competitions were the highlight of their entire college experience. They forced students to collaborate, make decisions quickly, and actually finish projects, which is more difficult to do during longer class projects for some reason.

Our teams became known for being particularly well-prepared, and other colleges started recognizing us at events. When our students arrived with their Alienware backpacks, other teams knew things were about to get competitive.

One limitation of our original program was that it focused heavily on programming. Game development also needs artists, animators, and designers. So we launched a second video game program focused on art and animation, designed to complement the programming program. This worked beautifully during competitions: programmers built the systems while artists created the visual assets. And it mirrored the way real game studios operate.

Fan Expo and the Science Centre

We also invested heavily in promotion. Each year we had a large booth in the video game section of Toronto Fan Expo, where visitors could play games created by our students and instructors.

But the biggest opportunity came in 2013, when Game ON 2.0, the largest video game exhibition in the world, was hosted at the Ontario Science Centre and our college was the official sponsor.

We built an interactive booth that included development stations and a touchscreen information display inspired by Microsoft’s Metro interface (created by yours truly). I also ran live game development demonstrations in the Science Centre’s grand auditorium, building parts of a game live on stage while involving the audience. There’s something uniquely satisfying about live-coding a game in front of a few hundred people and having it actually work.

By the end of 2013, our programs had developed a strong reputation. Within our niche, we were increasingly known as the video game college.

Things change…

In 2015, enrollments dipped. As a cost-saving measure, the college asked me to return to teaching IT classes for half of each day. That meant significantly less time for managing the programs, and the things that made the programs special (competitions, rapid curriculum updates, industry engagement) were also the things that required the most time. Hackathons and gameathons disappeared because coordinating them was practically a full-time job. Curriculum improvements slowed. Most of my remaining time was spent on faculty calls and resolving student or instructor issues.

In 2018 my involvement with the programs ended fairly suddenly. The college decided to take the programs in a different direction, focusing on smaller indie-style games. One of the biggest symbolic changes was replacing the Alienware laptops with MacBooks.

This definitely surprised the instructors… as well as our Marketing team (and later our Admissions team).

In the AAA game industry, macOS simply isn’t a common development platform, largely because Apple has historically prioritized other markets. Macs dominate many other development fields (web, mobile, enterprise, and increasingly data science), but for AAA game development, high-end gaming PCs remain the standard. And as shown here, the Internet is chalked full of Mac gaming humour ;-)

It failed miserably. After a relaunch and redesign, the programs eventually shifted again, this time back to a Windows PC geared for gaming. By 2020, the norm across most colleges was simply requiring students to bring a PC that met certain specifications, and we did the same.

That’s the last I heard about the programs until they were retired in late 2024.

By that point, however, all of the instructors I worked with had long since moved on. Some joined other colleges like Sheridan and Centennial. Others returned to the industry and worked on games for companies such as Ubisoft, Zynga, Microsoft, Double Fine Productions, Saber Interactive, and SEGA. Some split their time between teaching and industry work. I still keep in touch with most of them. Occasionally some of us meet up for board-game cafés, nerd movies, or escape rooms, which feels like a fitting reunion activity for a group of game developers. Here’s us outside the escape room we did last month, which required DnD knowledge to complete:

What I learned

1. Creative programs are only as strong as their people. Facilities and equipment matter, but creative programs ultimately succeed because of instructors and leaders who care deeply about the craft. Students notice when their mentors have real passion and experience.

2. Nothing teaches game development faster than trying to ship a playable game in 48 hours. Hackathons and game jams force students to collaborate, make decisions quickly, and ship something playable within a very short period of time. That experience teaches lessons no lecture can.

3. Community matters as much as curriculum. The competitions, the events, the industry guest speakers… they all created a shared culture around the program that students felt part of.

4. Momentum is fragile. Programs like this rely heavily on energy and leadership. When the people teaching or supporting the program lose time or backing, momentum can fade surprisingly quickly.

5. Tools send signals. Including Alienware laptops in the tuition wasn’t just about hardware. It signaled that the program understood its audience and took game development seriously. Similarly, the specific technologies taught in a program can tell you how industry-aligned the program is. Students notice all of those details.

6. Students remember experiences more than lectures. Years later, the things grads still talk about when they reach out to me are the competitions, the events, the late-night builds, and the games they worked on while they were at the college (and afterwards). This tells me that those moments matter, and matter a lot.

If you were one of the students or instructors involved in those years: thanks for being part of the ride. It was a fun one!

GG