SAE convention 2025

This week, my colleague from SAE Geneva and I went to Cologne for the SAE Convention, a gathering of the different SAE in the world. Like last year for Frankfurt, I took the train early. I arrived in Cologne in the early afternoon to have a meeting with the colleagues from the other SAE.

I came at the SAE convention a few years ago (2016 if I am right), so I already knew the campus, located in the industrial area of Mülheim.

Here were the four subjects that I came to share:

1. Common projects: Adding to the 3rd year common project on Unreal with the game arts students, we started to implement a common project from the beginning of the 2nd year on Unity. The goal is to have the Games Programming students learn to work together, production tools and how to manage production on a less ambitious project, before switching to the main project with the game art.
2. Personal work time: Still a big seller of the formation, we had some exchanges with the staffs from Zurich on how their voluntary implementation went compared to our mandatory implementation. We see a huge increase in the quality of our students in Geneva derived from this initiative and each month we see the progress from the first to the last year.
3. Entrance exams: It is always hard to balance between the business want and the quality when new students apply for the formation. Our goal is to have students who know what they signed off for. Our discussion come to the idea of a programming introduction test, than an exam. Our goal is for everything students that start on the first day to know about the content of the next 3 years and to have tried programming beforehand.
4. Use of IA: Our approach is pretty simple. Unlike modern approach that would simply use AI everywhere in game development (at least this is what we are getting sold), our approch is more conservative. It is always important for us that the students understand the output of the AI and not just blindly copy-paste the code. So in the first year, AI is very discouraged (to the point of making the students explain or rewrite functions if necessary) and is tolerated in the second year (except during theory exam).

The next day, there were a bunch of conference at the Palladium, mostly about AI. Nothing mindblowing, we are trying to sell us AI as this revolution, but I see it more like an assistant or a helper currently.

What I was most interested in was the SAE Awards where my students were nominated again this year for the Game Production category with the game Ruby and the Lost Crystals (Play it on Steam!). And they won the prize (again)! I am very proud of their work, but SAE awards are just a internal award and now we need to win awards against other schools. Cheers!