An award-winning Blizzard competition submission by UT Austin's Alexander Iveroth.
An award-winning Blizzard competition submission by UT Austin's Alexander Iveroth.
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How UT Austin is modernizing its video game design program

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 11 min

The video game industry changes all of the time, and so universities that are trying to teach video game design have to do that as well. That’s what the University of Texas at Austin is learning as it modernizes its video game program.

Creating relevant classes for game design is hard in part because the field is young and it is driven by technology that changes all of the time. Students have to learn all kinds of disciplines, including game design, game engine programming, art, and sound — particularly if they want to be independent game developers who make their own games in full.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.