Drexel's Game Design & Production undergraduate major, nationally ranked as a top program by multiple organizations including the Princeton Review (#8 in 2022), provides students with a strong, broad-based foundation in digital design and content creation skills in a team project environment. Students try on a wide variety of roles in game development–from idea to reality in art and code–discovering the skill areas that they want to pursue, focusing their minors, elective courses, and team experiences as they progress through the program.
The major supports careers in any industry that wants to speak the language of real-time interactive games. Beyond the obvious entertainment sector of PC, mixed-reality, mobile, or console games, graduates from the program are able to move into any industry in any geographic area in support of simulation, training, marketing, communications, and education.
The focus on project-based teamwork prepares students for cross-disciplinary work in any scale company. This includes large-budget AAA blockbuster game development with teams of hundreds in complex leadership hierarchies and focused, skilled technicians and artists, as well as small- and medium-size companies that require employees to wear multiple hats throughout development or independent studios that challenge individuals to juggle multiple responsibilities. Drexel Dragons can be specialists with a strong foundation that allows them to adapt, to be flexible bridge-builders and liaisons across art and technical teams, and rugged entrepreneurs wearing all the hats.
All industries evolve, and digital content creation of any type is particularly dynamic. Processes and job titles that exist today are likely to be automated in five years. Companies small to large will use established and newly developed commercially available tools, but also build and maintain their own in-house tools and pipelines.
Courses in Drexel's program evolve in response to industry trends and on-demand special topic courses are utilized to rapidly respond to student and industry developments. Gaining familiarity with rapidly changing industry-standard tools is important but it's equally important to be prepared to transfer skills in one tool into a different tool of the same type – to be able to move from a 3D modeling tool like Blender, to 3DS Max, to Maya, or to a proprietary in-house tool you can't touch until you're hired by that specific company. Drexel's program encourages students to become comfortable as tool-agnostic creators.
While courses are predominantly offered face-to-face on campus, we also offer a variety of virtual courses taught by a diverse range of professionals from across the nation, exposing students to a wider network of industry professionals and to the evolving climate of industry work as a significant number of studios have permanently moved to be partially or completely remote, even prior to 2020.
Students begin making game assets and games in their first terms as freshmen and continue making team-based game projects both small and large throughout their plan of study. Interdisciplinary teamwork is a core skill developed in teams of two to over eighteen, often spanning multiple programs including Computer Science, Music Industry, Animation, and more. Every project enables students to experiment and refine their experience in the many roles required to produce a finished game. Drexel University offers multiple opportunities to support the entrepreneurial minded student, from Drexel's on-campus indie incubator, the Entrepreneurial Game Studio, to the Close School of Entrepreneurship and the Baiada Institute for Entrepreneurship.
Career building begins inside the classroom with team projects and networking, and outside the classroom with six or eighteen months of co-op experiences.
To complement the creative focus of the Game Design & Production major, a minor in Computer Science is popular, and in many cases an ideal supplement for Game Design & Production students. The CS minor increases programming knowledge while maintaining a creative design and production focus in the Game Design & Production major. This or any of the over 120 minors available at Drexel would be easy to achieve within a plan of study using free electives.
To find out more about this major, visit the Westphal College's Game Design & Production Major page.