If you’ve been through Romania recently you’ve probably seen the “We hire!” signs by King (especially in Vama Veche, nice move!). The studio in Bucharest has been in a hiring spree in the last year or so and I assume it’s not really easy to find good people. And it’s not related to King as a company (they are one of the gaming company I really admire), but I think it’s related to the availability of talent in Romania.
While there are some great gaming companies in Romania, I really don’t think there’s enough workforce in the country right now with the right skills, at the right level to be hired in the gaming companies. Anybody that wants to create a team that’s bigger than 10 people has to train juniors at some point to get all the skills it needs (I might be wrong, but this is my feeling as someone deeply involved with the industry for the last year and a half).
And I remember meeting someone at the Hamburg Casual Connect earlier this year that was the Dean of the Gaming studies at a university in Hamburg. I mean, they have a curricular, you can actually choose gaming as a career and use the 4 years of college to get prepared for that.
I wonder, what should be done to do something similar in Romania? I have no idea right now, frankly, but I was thinking about it as I saw that a dental company in Romania (Dentestet) decided to create a school of dental technicians just because they need the skills in their company (link here in Romanian, and translation in English).
MavenHut is still a small company, but we might actually try to do this in the years to follow: create our own courses just to train new possible hires (you see the plans for MavenHut, right? :D ).
On the other hand, why wouldn’t art universities had a course of gaming art? Or the tech universities have a course of gaming programming? Or, even more surprising, economics universities should have gaming project management courses (and every studio head in Romania cringes right now).
I am not proposing something (at least not yet), as it’s something I was thinking about and I wish I knew what your opinion on the subject is.
Later edit: apparently, “the Ion Mincu Architecture University in Bucharest has a course on Level Design for several years now”, so it can be done (thanks, Claudiu, for the tip)
Later later edit: a good thing with this post was that I found more on the subject, like the class on Game Design at the Ion Mincu Architecture University.
P.S.: in the meanwhile, later tonight (Thursday, October 10th) you can attend a great panel on indie game at TechHub (how to create them, how to promote them, what results can you expect aso). Maybe these meetups are the seeds we need to get to the Gaming University of Romania. I would love to attend some classes there :D
Heh, already thinking about it. The problem is reach and impact. Can we do this in enough schools and universities? Do we even have enough people fit to teach this or do we have to train them first?
While I would support this in a split second (maybe we can talk about this sometime), I would see something else having a bigger impact: supporting young talent to try breaking into the industry by themselves as indies. Having that experience will teach you more than 4 years of intensive courses ever could. How would you have liked to have at least a bit of support when starting MavenHut? :)
I think that young people in Romania are natural gamers and hugely talented technically, and they are self thought more than school trained already, but what they mostly lack is experience, and that is something you cannot teach.
Anyway, this is a topic close to my heart, thanks for writing about it.
Well, small steps: it might be easier for us, as companies, to help indie games than help create a curricular, you are right :) I would still love to see classes in school, though.
Of course, I am glad that we see more and more indie companies being created (or at least becoming visible). And I include MavenHut in this, since we are such a young company, after all.
Anyway, food for thought for all of us, right?
P.S.: maybe associations like IGDA and RGDA would be better suited to push this kind of initiatives, with our help…
The Ion Mincu Architecture University in Bucharest has a course on Level Design for several years now.
That’s so cool. I didn’t know.
And yet it looks very strange to have a level design course at a university that’s all about architecture. The same happens at UNATC, they offer a Master in animation which, in my oppinion, is a joke :))
I think that a project like this could be introduced at a high school level, or even earlier. Not a class on gaming programming, that should be for universities, but a class in which the kids are encouraged to look for errors/glitches and problems in the story line would be interesting to see. Sort of like a group of testers, this being a good way for a lot of low budget companies to test their products.
Also, some gaming companies are really trying to develop a relationship with students, my faculty (ACE from Craiova) has a partnership with Ubisoft, and lots of student get a job at them even before they graduate… Ubisoft invites everyone who passes a basic understanding of programming techniques test to internships and advanced courses on gaming programming.
Ubisoft has a studio in Craiova, I think, right?
Yes, yes, that’s true, I think Ubisoft is only in Bucharest and Craiova in Romania, providing quite a lot of job openings here and not a bad salary, in my opinion…
I believe it :) And it’s interesting, because historically Craiova wasn’t a city you would expect to find talent, but I know from personal experience that the truth is different :)
You know, there are many Romanians working at these big studios like Uibsoft, Gameloft and King. Don’t you find it strange that there aren’t any gaming schools and yet a lot of people work on these studios?
I particularry like this subject because I’ve been travelling in Denmark and Norway and actually teching in Norway, at a gaming school :)
It’svery strange what happens in Romania, no gaming or animation schools, but apparently many people work in these 2 related industries.
My oppinion is that there aren’t too many game developers in Romania, there are a lot of programmers but, as you may already know, games are not only about programmign, right? so this leaves us with the answer about why there aren’t too many small game and/or animation studios in Romania :)