School of Game Development

Game Development Collaboratives & Internships

Industry Partnerships

With strong ties to the gaming industry, the School of Game Development gives you real opportunities to work with the best before you even graduate. Many of our faculty come straight from top studios, bringing experience, insight, and connections that open doors to serious industry partnerships. This isn’t just school. It’s your launchpad to a thriving career.

Game Studio Collaboratives Class Experience

Game Studio Collaboratives Class Experience

The School of Game Development requires students to take the Game Studio class during their junior or senior year, as it models the workflows, pipelines, and interdisciplinary environments of professional game development studios. Many of our visiting industry guests have praised the immersive, comprehensive, and collaborative nature of the class. It provides a structured introduction to the real-world realities of the game industry, and prepares students for the rigors of the profession. The class covers the pre-production and production phases of development with a focus on project structure, prototyping, and iteration.

Students studying both Game Art and Game Design in the collaborative classes will generate work based on their degree emphasis, whether that is concept development, 2D/ 3D asset creation, gameplay mechanics, game systems, level layouts, or design documentation. The goal is to empower every student to create portfolio-ready work and potentially releasable, published projects on a variety of platforms. Students are also presented with the opportunity to collaborate with other schools at the Academy, depending on their projects’ requirements.

CBS

The Academy of Art University’s School of Game Development is partnering with KPIX/CBS to design, model and animate forward-thinking concepts at the intersection of augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR) in the context of news broadcasting.

NASA

Academy of Art University and NASA ARC collaborated on a project focused on developing Astrobee and future iterations of the platform. The project will include developing new use cases for Astrobee in its current state and conceptualizing on future iteration with existing or future platforms. The Game Development Department will help with the gamification and coding of the project.

Stelantis

The Stellantis project involved collaboration between teams from the Academy of Art University’s Industrial Design and Game Development schools. Envisioning the future of passenger vehicles by 2025, 2030, and 2035, students developed various playable prototypes, including games that incorporated full VR/AR interactivity. The final three games, based on concepts from future Jeep, Peugeot, and Maserati, vehicles, were completed by the end of Fall 2023 and celebrated with nostalgic box art.

Rockwell

From 2016 to 2018, students at the Academy of Art University designed and built the VR component for the Norman Rockwell Museum’s traveling Four Freedoms exhibition, collaborating across Game Development, Illustration, UI/UX, Animation, Music, and Interaction Design to bring emerging technology into the museum space. Their goal was ambitious: to allow visitors to step inside Rockwell’s Four Freedoms paintings through Oculus VR, bridging historical art and immersive media. The student-driven project debuted publicly in 2018 at The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, and was later presented to members of Congress in Washington, D.C.