Where art and technology collide, the gaming industry is bigger than the movie and music industries combined. More than 2.5 billion people worldwide play games and it’s the fastest growing entertainment industry in the world.
Digital games development is a crucial pillar for the Australian economy with non-traditional gaming companies increasingly making video games part of everyday platforms such as Netflix and Spotify.
Your career in gaming could take many different paths. From production, to design, animation, programming, sound or quality assurance, to name just a few.
The career opportunities within gaming are expanding exponentially. Not limited to the creative industries, games can be everything from simple casual mobile games through to amazing virtual reality worlds that exist within health, defence, education, information technology, and more.
*PwC Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2022-26
⬆︎ A$464.4B
Gaming Industry projected worth by 2026
*PwC Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2022-26
Build a career making games.
Designed for those interested in the creative side of gaming, in this specialised degree you’ll develop the essential skills in creative game production and design using industry standard software and game engines.
You'll be equipped with essential skills in art asset creation to create interactive worlds for games and game design, and a sound knowledge of the game design pipeline.
Build a career in game development.
Designed for those interested in the technical side of game development, you’ll develop the skills required to produce complex interactive systems used in gaming through coding and programming.
Gaming systems are essential to all kinds of industries, and with this degree you’ll be prepared to work in a range of fields, from entertainment to defence, health care to corporate, education and government.
*Available at Flinders City campus.
During your degree, you'll have access to state-of-the-art, purpose-built learning facilities that are designed to help you build your skills in the gaming industry.
As South Australia's biggest motion capture and virtual reality lab, the Void is a multipurpose production stage housed at the Bedford Park campus.
Incorporating motion capture and virtual production capability with Unreal Engine as unifying technology, The Void is a platform for creating screen experiences of any kind.
This is a space for developing serious games, Alienware computers for high-level computer processing, proximity , VR, light-controlled capabilities, 3D camera, green/blue screen, and recording devices.
The Simulation and Serious Games Lab is full of equipment for high-level gaming - a set of Xboxes and Kinects, tablets for mobile app development, and haptics devices. Students learn to utilise a range of development environments and technologies, including Unity, Unreal Engine, Visual Studio, XNA Game Studio, etc. Students learn to use these and gain general technical programming skills in the modern and foundational programming languages.
This space is for independent project work using tools such as soldering equipment, 3D modelling, CAD drawing, MATLAB and Visual Studio. Students can do calculations, run simulations, and write code. After the creative process has been completed, students can utilise the 3D printers in order to make their designs a reality.
Graduates with qualifications in gaming are in demand across a broad range of industries. Your career could be in gaming within the creative industries, health, IT, defence, or education, to name just a few.
“
At Flinders ... the lecturer who was there was very enthusiastic about what he wanted to teach, and inspired me that one step further to go. 'I want to do this in university, I want to do it here, and I want that guidance of that enthusiasm'.
Tina Fotopoulos Bachelor of Information Technology (Game Development)
Through a unique partnership with MPC and Technicolor Creative Studios, our students can access the Technicolor Creative Studios’ Academy, a training program that delivers hundreds of graduates into visual effects jobs all over the globe.
Moving Picture Company (MPC) is a global VFX studio with decades of storytelling experience across the feature film and episodic industries, with award-winning highlights including The Lion King, 1917, The Mandalorian and WandaVision.
The unique partnership between Flinders and Moving Picture Company, a Technicolour Creative Studio, allows our Creative Arts students to work directly with industry to develop the specialist creative and technological skills to enter the growing VFX industry.
Our incredible teaching and research staff within the digital media, games and visual effects sector are experts in their professions and well-connected to industry.
Brett has had an interest in technology and gadgets for his entire life and has pursued that interest through his education, teaching and research. With an early desire to become a novelist when he commenced his university journey Brett transitioned into the field of information technology but maintained that creative drive through games and digital narratives.
Having worked in industry for a time in general IT roles Brett returned to university to pursue a research career. In the early 2000s, he developed a web browser for the iPAQ PDA that tailored web content to the reduced screen real estate and functionality afforded by those mobile devices. He then continued his exploration of novel interaction domains by developing and evaluating the use of indirect interaction techniques within an optical see through augmented reality environment.
As an avid gamer he enjoys mixing his work and recreation time exploring the concepts associated with game design, digital narratives, player experience, novel gameplay activities, virtual cooperative gameplay, serious games and game evaluation frameworks. He has been involved in the development of a number of serious games in the domains of health and education.
“Most of my artistic time is spent off the computer and as a sculptor/model maker at heart I love to stick bits of junk together to make something cool...or weird...or weirdly cool. I like to play in the fringes where the digital and traditional art worlds meet. As a Lecturer in Digital Media at Flinders University my day to day job involves teaching others to let their creative brain loose.”
Born in the year that we first walked on the moon, Flinders Lecturer in Digital Media, Shane Bevin spent most of his school lunch money on Time Pilot, Moon Patrol and Xevious...the dawn of the video game era. His first computer was a ZX81 with 1 KB of ram, a 3.5 MHz processor and any colour on screen you liked (as long as it was black or white). As an art tool, it was somewhat limited, but digital art slowly took over Shane’s life.
Co-founder of Adelaide animation studio Monkeystack, Shane has experience in animation project management, render wrangling, 3d production, Virtual Reality production and software management.
He has been awarded multiple times for his work as director, art director and technical director, and his many years of teaching and production experience brings an exciting, energetic industry focus to the delivery of curriculum.
Flinders University’s Katie Cavanagh lectures in 'hands-on' digital media topics, where she happily frolics and explores the convergence and combination of text, design, image and meaning.
Katie has a wealth of practical experience to offer students, having worked as a graphic designer, web monkey, and project manager for TechWorks and TMP Worldwide. Her skills have enhanced Flinders’ world-class visual effects credentials, highlighted by back-to-back wins in the prestigious Rookies Awards.
“Winning the Rookies, School of the Year: Digital Illustration in 2017 was amazing; holding the title for the second year against such strong competition underscores the rigour of our world-class degree. Of particular note, Flinders students were ranked among the most industry-ready participants in the international competition.”
The Rookies global rankings (2017 and 2018) place Flinders University in collaboration with CDW Studios as the world's No. 1 Digital Illustration School. The relaunched Bachelor of Creative Arts (Visual Effects and Entertainment Design) provides students with industry focused skills and knowledge that Katie is confident will see them graduate job ready.
“We changed the name to Visual Effects and Entertainment Design to help clarify both for the students and for prospective employers what the students have studied. The future in the VFX space is looking bright. South Australia has always been a creative state but now there is more work for artists here.”
A Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and practitioner in Visual Effects, Postproduction, Animation and Film related courses. Jason has been a Course Leader in Visual Effects and associated subjects for over 2 decades. Before joining Flinders, he spent 2019 working as an Associate Professor in Visual Effects at XJTLU in Suzhou, China, helping to set up a new State of the Art Film School. He is currently an honorary Associate Professor in Visual Effects at the University of Liverpool in the UK.
Jason is a regular guest speaker at Visual Effects education events and has presented at the FMX conference in Stuttgart, Createch in Mumbai, Screen Alliance Wales education events, UCAS and Skillset network events. Jason is an accomplished Film Editor with IMDB credits. Throughout his teaching he has been involved in numerous collaborative projects such as 'Combat Medics' for Sky and ‘The Machine’ for Red & Black films. Jason’s technical expertise is in editing, compositing, and 3D animation software, although he has a working knowledge of all areas of Visual Effects and Film Production.
Simon is the Founder and Director of CDW Studios, and is also an Instructor across a range of subjects in the Bachelor of Creative Arts (Visual Effects and Entertainment Design).
He has been working in the industry for over 15 years across a number of areas, from illustration, environment design, to matte painting. His clients have ranged from THQ, EA Games, LEGO, Mighty Kingdom, Animal Logic, Warner Bros, and TT Games, to name a few.
Since opening CDW Studios’ doors in 2011, Simon’s focus has been to create a world class education facility based in Australia. He has facilitated many masterclasses with some of the absolute best artists in the world coming out to Australia to share their wealth of knowledge with students in the Bachelor degree.
Lauren Woolbright specialises in interactive media design, games, and Environmental Humanities. She seeks to produce meaningful mediated experiences through games, focusing on inclusive game design practices and environmental storytelling. She teaches topics in VEED including Interaction Design and game design.
Living and studying overseas presents you with the unique opportunity to immerse yourself in the local culture while continuing your tertiary study at one of Flinders University’s 70+ overseas partner universities.
Why wait until you graduate to see the world? Let our program offer you the educational adventure of a lifetime.
At Flinders the gaming courses are split across the Science & Engineering and the Creative Arts Colleges. In the Bachelor of Information Technology (Game Development), you'll focus on programming and coding games - the technical aspect of gaming. In the Bachelor of Creative Arts (Game Production), you'll focus on and specialise in the creative aspect of designing games.
In the Bachelor of Creative Industries (Interactive Design), you'll gain broad experience in not only just creating games, but across the broader creative industries.
You may also be interested in the Bachelor of Creative Arts (Visual Effects and Entertainment Design) which focusses on creating for 2D, 3D, animation or VFX and is run in conjunction with CDW Studios. Or you may also be interested in the Bachelor of Creative Industries (Digital Media), which is an even broader degree designed to give you experience across a range of sectors within the creative industries, including, but not limited to, visual effects and gaming.
The Bachelor of Creative Industries degrees can be used as a pathway into the Bachelor of Creative Arts.
The skills you learn will put you in great stead for many other careers - for instance, training AIs and machine learning are invaluable in other industry sectors too, whilst computer modelling and special effects are used in places as varied as industrial design all the way to the movie industry. Build yourself a career whilst having fun at Flinders.
As South Australia’s no. 1 university in Creative Arts for full-time employment, learner engagement, skills development, student support and teaching quality*, we work hard to stay at the coalface of technology.
Whether you want to hone your skills in a certain area of game development or are looking at gaining a broader skill set, Flinders has the right degree for you to choose from. Within our gaming ecosystem, you will always find the right people to collaborate with.
Home of the multipurpose production stage The Void, Flinders offers you a motion capture and virtual production facility second to none in South Australia. Paired with state-of-the-art simulation labs, you’ll learn to produce games using software such as Unreal Engine, Shogun and Vicon to support your vision.
Sturt Rd, Bedford Park
South Australia 5042
South Australia | Northern Territory
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CRICOS Provider: 00114A TEQSA Provider ID: PRV12097 TEQSA category: Australian University
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