You should've taken Computer Science or Software Engineering if you wanted to program. Sorry mate.
When I was choosing a course back in 2012, I had no interesting programming. I was super dedicated to the "design" part of design; I wanted to be a level or story designer, and so I was choosing a course that looks at the general principles of game design. I wanted a course that could help me learn interesting subjects related to games (like psychology and philosophy) but also how to use tools like Unreal and Unity, how to sell games in the market and advertising, how to go about certification and so on, so forth. It wasn't until last year when we were forcibly shunted into building games (which should have happened a lot earlier) when I found myself really enjoying (and somewhat decent) at coding.
tl;dr, With hindsight I now know I want to be a programmer, but when I started I had no idea and the people at the college didn't tell me how "visually-orientated" this course would be.
I do feel like stuff like designing characters and coming up with a good story for them is kinda important for making games, but the 3D modelling part just sounds dumb.
We had multiple proper story design classes. Not to be a bragging richardhead, but I'd argue I'm as good at writing stories as people who do proper English majors or the like since I've been practising storywriting since Primary School.
in all honesty, programming is something you should've learned on your downtime.
I struggle to learn things on my self, which was a big reason I pushed for going to college rather than just finding a job and making games in my spare time out of High School. Right now I'm researching hiring a math tutor, because my understanding of math is awful and I've had a lot of difficulty trying to relearn and learn all of the concepts from High School and the ones I missed.
I'm also not sure why you expected all your other classes to be about games. that's just how college is
and regardless of your reasoning, going to an art school for a scientific major is a really bad idea
I guess I'm a bit of an idealist/optimist and I was hoping everything I do at college would further my ability to make games.
The big problem I feel is that every head of department has been an Animation teacher, and I feel like the Games course is just the Animation course with a few classes swapped. Even now, while the current heads are super cool, I don't think they understand much about making games or releasing them to the public. The college doesn't currently have a games teacher at all, and there's no games-specific classes being taught. I have a feeling they're going to cut their loses and just end the games program soon.
For the art school thing, see the top. I didn't really know it was an art school when I first checked it all out because the people I talked to kind of hid it from me, and I wasn't yet interested on programming.
I think it would have been better for you if they required a drawing and design class though. Throwing you under the bus like that and expecting you to know that sort of stuff is not good for a college to do.
The teacher in charge of this Character Design class is quite livid that we don't have drawing classes beforehand, and is trying to make them split the class down into other composite classes including Life Drawing.
