TL;DR: Should I switch to Graphic Design major (for indie dev/career fallback)? I probably need to convince my family 'cause they're funding my education.
Context:
- Software Engineer major - 1st semester
- I've made over dozen of jam games
- I plan on joining game jams/game dev compeition on a monthly basis
- While doing longer-term HTML5-game projects for release (for the first time)
Future plans:
- I wanna go full-time indie after graduation (3-year program)
- I'm not in a first world country so that would be easier (200$ per month for rent and food)
- My family wants me to work in corporates while I only think of that as a fallback option
Friends:
-
A Graphic Design major friend suggested that I switched major
- He said: "game companies prefer graphic designers who can code over software engineer who can do art"
-
Some older friend of mine in the uni said if I could made video games then I code better than most older students
- They probably don't understand anything at all or have no finished products
Majors:
- I see game development is more than just coding: gameplay, art, story, sounds, music and more...
- Graphic Design offers Drawing Still-life/Statue, Perspective, Human Anatomy, Photography, Typography, Art History, Storyboarding, 3D Modeling & Texturing (Maya), Rigging, 3D Character Animation, UX, Web Design. (Not exhausive)
- While Software Engineering offers Computer Science, C (the language), Maths, Front-end Web Dev, OOP, Databases, Operating Systems, Japanese (Yep), Java (Desktop, OOP, Web-Based), Data Structures and Algorithms, Networking, Software Engineering Introduction, .NET and C#, Software Requirement and Testing, Start Your Business, Human-Computer Interaction, Mobile Programming. (Again not exhausive)
-
I just typed that out for the first time and I can see that:
- So many things in Software Engineering that I'm not sure if they're needed for gamedev (Java, C, .NET and C#,...)
- While Graphic Design has so many overlapping with game development
