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BA (Hons) Games Design and Development (top up)
Why choose this course?
- Top up your Foundation degree or HND to an Honours Degree within a year
- Benefit from HRC’s VR Development Room with Oculus, Vive and Omni-Treadmill
- 10th in the UK for animation and games design (Guardian University Guide, 2025)
Already have a foundation degree or HND and looking to top-up your skills in game design and programming?
Grow your existing skill set with this innovative Games Design & Development top up course delivered by Hertford Regional College. This course has been expertly designed for the enthusiastic and creative individual with a foundation degree or HND in a design discipline seeking to advance their career in games development or related fields.
Enhance your personal toolkit of essential games design knowledge and skills. Challenge yourself to think critically and solve problems through a combination of theory and practical projects.
Over the course of the year, you will learn from industry experts who will bring their practical experience into the classroom to inform their teaching. The invaluable insights will broaden your understanding of key course concepts.
You will complete this course having gained a well-rounded design education that will make you stand out to employers. Having developed your technical knowledge and grown your professionalism and intellectual depth, you will be ready to succeed the professional world, wherever your career takes you.
What's the course about?
With a focus on ensuring you are prepared for the professional world, this course is highly informed by specific skills required by leading game developers. You will advance your creativity, improve your technical software skills, and deepen your industry knowledge. You will learn from a wide array of resource, analysing historical and contemporary references as well cultural and social contexts. With this, you will develop a well-rounded understanding of key concepts which will feed into your personal style.
There is the opportunity for you to take charge of what value you get from the programme, with options to specialise in designing, programming, modelling or animation. You will also be able to focus on your individual interests in any of these specialisms by producing a personal portfolio of your work to reflect industry and professional practice needs.
Outside of the classroom, you will also have the chance to get involved in co-curricular activities that will enhance your learning. One of such activities is the D&AD Games Design live-brief, where you can put your skills to practice through the creative excellence in design. Considered to be the world’s most prestigious benchmark for commercial creativity, the award gives you a chance to land a job in the creative industry by getting a head start while at university, gaining you the exposure needed to potentially kick start your own career path.
What will I study?
Teaching will be delivered through a mix of dynamic and interactive lectures and workshops. Your learning will be an engaging and enjoyable experience delivered through a variety of methods by highly skilled lecturers with industry experience. You will have a mix of practicals, workshops, face-to-face sessions, in-person industry talks and learning how to use new techniques and software, each carefully selected to provide you with unique and essential capabilities for the professional world.
Enhance your experiences of Games Design and Development principles across your year of study. You will study three modules that have been curated to grow your skillset in uniquely different and equally important ways. Learn the intricate details of gameplay mode creation with an end-to-end process from conceptualisation to prototyping and experimentation. You will also grow your knowledge of the business aspect of game creation, working on the distribution of a game on an online platform. You will conclude your study with a project that is tailored to your own interests and showcases your professional skills.
In addition to developing these key technical skills, your classes and assessments will help you to further develop analytical skills and encourage you to continuously reflect on your individual or group performance. This will ensure you are consistently improving on your methods to create appealing gaming experiences.