At Kent State, students can design video games and get graded for it, Vas Patibandla said.

Patibandla, assistant professor at the Tuscarawas campus, said students interested in the game design can take classes such as Game Development, Computer Animation and Development, Multimedia Virtual Reality II and Advanced Computer Animation and Gaming Development.

“Gaming has developed in the last 10 years, which has created a lot of jobs,” Patibandla said.

These classes will help build skills needed in the industry, Patibandla said.

Patibandla said there are three components to a gaming course. First, there is the game concept, asking who are the characters. The second element is content creation, where students are able to model characters and environments with texture.

“This is where most gaming jobs are found,” Patibandla said.

Finally, there is scripting, which is the ability to customize the game engine you are using.

Jeramy Spring, senior computer animation and design major, took the Advanced Computer Animation and Gaming Development course taught by Patibandla.

“Basically, we built a video game from the ground up,” Spring said.

Spring said his class was split into groups and his group decided to create a warrior type of a game.

“We did everything a professional studio does,” Spring said. “There were deadlines and meetings, and we created our own characters.”

Patibandla explained the importance of gaming to today’s current society.

“Gaming is doing for 3-D modeling what the Internet did for 2-D modeling,” he said.

All computer animation classes are taught at the Kent Tuscarawas campus, but students at the Kent campus can take the same courses via distance learning in Van Deusen Hall.

For more information on the game design classes or gaming as a major, contact Vas Patibandla at [email protected].

Contact School of Technology reporter Holly Mueller at [email protected].