DSU’s video game design program ranked in world top 40

MADISON, S.D. (Dakota News Now) — The worldwide video game market is estimated at over $350 billion. So, it is no surprise that over 2,000 colleges and universities across the globe offer a game design program.

Many those ranked in the 2024 Princeton Review’s top 50 are located in places you’d expect — land-grant institutions with mammoth endowments, or private and tech-driven institutions in Silicon Valley, New York City, and other coastal technological hubs.

Sitting at No. 36 is a public school of less than 4,000 in Madison, S.D. — population 6,097.

Those who lead Dakota State’s program say this is because students don’t just learn how to make games, they actually make them and put them on the market.

“Our students learn how to create art, to program for games, our students learn how to be a designer,” said Erik Pederson, an assistant professor of game design. “In general, its a design program and when they graduate, what they have isn’t a piece of paper that’s slid across a table. Their resume is their iPad, or their laptop, or the games they’ve actually published, and that becomes what they do.”

Constantly updating their state-of-the-art technology to keep up with industry standards — as in, every three to four months — DSU sends game design majors through a two-year project that spans from “concept to console” as students learn every phase of game design, from creation to final product.

The variety of creations in the 10 years of the program is vast. Some aren’t the traditional video games that would come to mind. Last year, a group put together a project Minneapolis Children’s Hospital, training new nurses on how to find things around the hospital when they start their jobs.

“So, its interactive simulation software. It’s not just a game,” Pederson said.

But in Pederson’s four years leading the program, there have been plenty of games — all one-player games because the networking for multi-player games is “too expensive.” Pederson said the concepts have been “everything from first-room shooters, to escape room games, to crazy little demon games that run around.”

Emily Nance is a recent graduate who came to DSU from Colorado whose creation falls into the latter. Last year as a junior, she took the project courses, but also worked on a team with fellow juniors, to program and produce a game created by a senior.

During that time, Nance also formulated the construct of her own game, called “Speed Demon.”

“You play as Spud the Speed Demon,” Nance said. You’re just a little potato guy who was given magical life by a dragon, and then you betray your dragon overlord to go hunt down all of his minions, and at the end, you fire cannons at the dragons. It’s just meant to be a lot of silly fun. A lot of action chaos.

“I was wanting to make a game in which the mechanics were so simple that anyone could play it, and I think I succeeded.”

About a year ago, at the end of that junior year, Nance and other juniors who created their own games pitched their concept a group of faculty and students. “Speed Demon” was one of a select several that panel decided to green-light for 2023-24.

That meant Nance spent her senior year leading a team of eight — herself, four juniors, and three seniors whose concepts weren’t approved — to turn “Speed Demon” from her brainchild to a reality.

“It’s very intense. It’s such a fun thing to do, but the program has a lot of things to do. A lot of outside classwork, and that carries over into the industry as well.”

Pederson feels that game designing is one of the most difficult programs DSU has because of the amount of technology and design the students have to learn. He estimates some students spend 40 to 50 hours a week working on these projects.

“We have to jam a lot into four years,” Pederson said. “The game industry itself has gone from a fun type thing to everyday work. It is work. The whole (mantra) of ‘if work is so much its not work, anymore,’ well, thats a misnomer. It’s not true. It’s a lot of hours, a lot of time.

“By the time they graduate, they typically hate the games they’re making because they’ve been working on them for year cycles.”

Asked if this was her case, Nance said “very much.” Asked how she battled through that, Nance said “you have to learn to fall in love with it every time you get tired.”

It is a slog,” Nance said. “It is very hard putting it together, but the process is so much fun for how hard it is, and the product at the end is incredible.

“It’s pretty incredible. It’s so wonderful to have ideas you have in your head turn into something you can touch and interact with and just sort of enjoy. It’s really beautiful.”

The most fun part about the process, Nance said, is the people she worked with.

“When you’re with a team that you like, who know all their stuff — my team was incredible this last year — who know all their stuff who are just having a great time, it’s basically like you’re playing a game,” Nance said. “You’re making something with your friends.”

The social part of the process is just as important as anything technical the students learn, said both Pederson and his fellow assistant game design professor Peter Britton. Both have worked all over the country, and both came to academia from the creative computer arts industry — Pederson in gaming and Britton in animation.

“(Social skills) are very important, because you have to be able to talk to people and express yourself, and it’s always a delicate interaction with anyone, because sometimes people interrupt others and they don’t know how to say their opinions without being aggressive or overly opinionated,” Britton said. “There’s a lot of friction sometimes when developing.”

The DSU professors said they start implementing the social skills — or as they call it, “soft skills” — in the first semester of the four-semester program. It takes some students until the final semester to break through and work well with others.

Asked how he feels when that breakthrough occurs, Britton’s eyes lit up.

“It’s why I am here,” Britton said. “It is what I like the most. A lot of students come in and are shy and they aren’t willing to say what is on their mind, and they shift from that to be able to speak in front of people and also be able to share what they have done and what they can do. Having that pride in their work and the interactivity with anyone, to be willing to share what they do, that shift is always rewarding to see.”

Nance’s “Speed Demon” is available on a couple different online “game stores” — itch.io and “Steam.”

She calls the entire DSU game design experience “very fulfilling and very creative.” She hopes to latch onto an independent gaming company, one without the creative limitations of a big corporation.

Pederson said DSU gaming graduates have landed all kinds of industry gigs in cities all over the country.

“The industry is huge. It’s everywhere,” Pederson said. “If Covid taught us anything, it taught the game industry that it can be remotely done. You can make games with remote teams. A good student with a lot of quality and a lot of skills can get a job working for a company in San Francisco and stay in the basement in South Dakota and get paid a San Francisco wage. The cost of living is extremely cheap in SD compared to San Fran”

And teaching the industry in South Dakota also has its perks, like flexibility and a lack of state laws restricting the use of new industry technology at its universities.

“We can try things, we can implement things,” Pederson said. “If we were at USC in Southern California, there’s a lot of red tape that you have to go through to implement new changes. So, I think DSU is able to keep up with what’s happening.”

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