I don't know what it's like for other colleges/universities. For us, it's a three year program. The first two years you don't really have an option on what you take, there's a fork somewhere down the line that basically divides IBM/business programming and standard programming stuff. The first two years we had one course in C, two courses in C++, a Unix course, two database courses(using Oracle), an AS400/iSeries course, one course on XHTML, one on Perl, one on C# in conjunction with ASP.NET, one on Java, two analysis and design courses that basically boils down to project planning from concept to forming an actual plan, and other odds and ends.
Our third year is where you specialize in a given area. For the game programming stream, we're required to take data structures and algorithms which included building several kinds of trees including game trees for the purposes of simple AI, several kinds of tables and search algorithms, all of which focusing on efficiency. We had to take an introductory game programming course where we worked with DirectX. We took a game customization course where we used 3DS MAX to make models and textured them, eventually importing them into Unreal Tournament 2004 along with learning how to use the Unreal Editor to make UT2004 maps and even did a little bit of scripting with UT2004.
That was most of my semester during the fall. I'm in my final semester now and I'm taking the continuation of the DirectX course, we're doing stuff like terrain, skyboxes, force feedback on joysticks, importing models, multi-texturing, mirrors, shadows, and working with HLSL for shaders(vertex shading and pixel shading). That course also has a research project within it so every one in the class has a different project that tackles an aspect of game programming, like environment mapping, anti-aliasing, portals, cel-shading, etc. I'm doing water for mine, having a hell of a time with it too... it's difficult. I want to do both 3D and 2D water but I don't have a whole lot of time left this semester and I have a shit load of stuff to do, I'm going with 3D water for now. I'm also doing a game physics course where we're programmatically launching cubes and making them arc across the sky, making objects orbit around each other as the object that they're rotating around is moving, collision detection, all that stuff. I'm doing a 3D modeling tools course as well which feels like a waste of time. In that course we're working with MAXScript, Blender, GIMP and Python. And there's the big project course. Last semester we spent the whole course planning a project from concept to documenting and modeling the system design. This semester we're implementing that plan in code. We're doing it in Java and we're writing a system for a Bed & Breakfast business in the city.
The workload is fucking immense during the last few semesters. This last semester is ridiculous. People bitch about the homework in high school... you youngins don't know how good you have it.
If you're interested I uploaded the work I did last semester in the introductory course to game programming using C++/DirectX. Arrow keys to control your plane, F to toggle your HUD(off by default), A and S to yaw your plane and Z and X to increase/decrease speed. ESC to quit. The game doesn't really have an end, you fly through the checkpoints and that's it. Nothing fancy like physics and acceleration, it was only an introductory course. There's basic collision detection with the ground but you don't die or anything like that and it fucks up the controls(not that that matters as you're supposed to die anyway). Altogether this game took 6066 lines of code. I'm not giving you the code.
https://www.yousendit.com/download/UmNMeEVSSU93TGl4dnc9PQ
EDIT: Forgot to mention that this requires at least DirectX 9.0c and you need to be logged into an Administrator-privileged Windows account to run this.
