York Tech teaching video game design to teen enthusiasts

Pokemon Go has inspired a new generation of video gamers eager to unleash their imaginations on the gaming world. And some of them are already busy learning the ropes.

Game enthusiast Christian Gallien, 15, is among about a dozen eighth- to 12th-grade students who are learning game design skills this week in summer camp at York Technical College in Rock Hill. It’s one of eight Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, or STEM, camps offered at York Tech.

The video game design students are learning how to use the game render engine Unity Technology to create a three-dimensional game. At the end of the camp, they are expected to be able to take away a working game to be played on a desktop computer.

“It’s cool to see all of your work to create a world that you can interact with,” said Christian, who is from Lancaster. At home, he has his own game server and has begun to explore animation software.

Ben Kohler and Jeremy Hirtle, information technology employees at York Tech, are teaching the Unity camp. Students learn how to set up the controls for navigation and character movement to render a 3D world, they said.

Game programming “is kind of the in thing,” said Kohler, who has led video game design classes before. It’s inspired in part by the enormous popularity of Pokemon Go, a location-based, augmented reality game for mobile devices that was released this month.

Kohler said Pokemon Go was created using Unity.

However, the ability to create games in Unity requires some additional technical knowledge, Kohler said. During the camp, students are introduced to C# (pronounced “see sharp”), a programming language.

Video game design can be a lot of fun, Hirtle said, but it involves time and patience.

“It’s sort of a logical puzzle,” he said, “and you have to follow along and understand what you’re doing.”

Noah Bennett, 15, of Charlotte, said he has enjoyed the design camp, an extension of his interest in video games. “It’s one of my hobbies,” he said.

Noah also took an earlier camp at York Tech, in which he learned to use Kodu, a Web-based video game programming tool that is simpler than Unity. Noah and several other classmates created a video game during the Kodu camp, he said.

Dexter Harlee, director of the STEM camps, said they are being offered through a partnership with Rock Hill Economic Development Corp., which helped pay for them. The STEM camps were first offered last summer.

Other camps included Crazy Talk, Harlee said, in which campers created characters that sing and dance; a human anatomy simulation camp using software that allows them to see how life develops; an HTML animation camp; computer networking; and digital photography.

Students learn that game programming “isn’t the easiest thing in the world,” Kohler said. “It’s a lot of information you have to remember and get to know.”

“It’s going to be the guy that puts the most time and work into doing these things that is going to have something that is worth everyone’s time,” he said.

This story was originally published July 27, 2016 at 4:51 PM with the headline "York Tech teaching video game design to teen enthusiasts."