I've been an active member of the Colorado Game Developers Association for something like 12 years, I think. I'm not even sure anymore when I first started going to the monthly meetings. Mark Baldwin (co-creator of Empire Deluxe, The Perfect General and many other grand classics) and the late Eric Dybsand formed up the group maybe 15 years back and it's been going strong ever since. It's apparently the longest-running formal gathering of game developers in the whole U.S.! Pretty sweet.

Since I'm one of the "old salts" of the group, I've been taking more of a mentor-like role for a lot of the video game design & development students from many local colleges and universities. There have been a lot of students showing up to our meetings during the recent years, since we started meeting at Denver area academic institutions like Colorado Art Institute, Westwood College and DeVry Institute. Each of these schools has a formal degree program for some form of video game design or development and their programs are growing.

Aside from talking about these schools and their programs on GameDevSchool.com, I'll look at many other schools around the country to see what's going on in the bigger campuses and more progressive schools offering game development curriculae. The local Denver schools have professional advisory meetings regularly, which I've taken part in as much as possible. I'll work on reporting about their progress as much as I see it being relevant.

We clearly need to start up some form of school directory for game and game art programs, but I'm not sure how to structure it yet. It's hard to "review" an institution without attending it, but I'd like to post details about the curriculae and degree programs on some level. Other schools around here, like the Front Range Community College and the University of Colorado and University of Denver are all putting together more advanced/inclusive programs that I look forward to researching more.

Well... I just wanted to drop a note to point out some plans for GameDevSchool.com so you know why the heck this site exists! Hope it comes in handy for some people.

Oh... I also plan on blogging about my own game development research from past projects I've done as well as my ongoing game design work and projects. Yay! I have a lot of work to do! :)

Thanks for visiting!
--Paul Hoza