Me neither. That said, in retrospect, I believe university is more similar to real jobs that people give it credit for - the tedium only gets worse in a typical dayjob. As much as I hate "fake enrollment DB" exercises, they're pretty accurate description of how the work looks like.
(I used to want to go into gamedev professionally; due to various life events I went a different way. Judging by stories from both HN and IRL people I know from the industry, I may have dodged a bullet here.)
Yeah, you can get there that way but it’s a slog, and the reward is a long way off. That’s not like work. At work you get a regular paycheck even if enrollment DB isn’t thrilling.
I saw an open source class called nand to tetris where students had a semester to create a machine that could play tetris, starting with only nand gates. I thought that seemed like a much more fun progression for computer hardware than the undergrad courses I took. I would love to discover something similar for programming but so far I haven't found it.
Simple 2d game
To do app
Timesheet app
Implement a clone of x with something extra of your choosing
Top Twitter celebrity app using its API
Building a search engine
Creating a programming language
Our database class did use databases, but we had no integration of the two subjects.
Creating the 10000th Conways Game of Life? Developing some crappy game on my own? No, thanks.
Developing something for an existing game? That would have been great! I'm all with you.
I wish more CS/programming classes, particularly pre-college, were game-oriented. A Java course I took in school had us writing a 'database' command line app that held fake enrollment information. Had that kind of thing been the only exposure to programming that I was given, I almost certainly would not have entered the field. But show someone like me a way to automate or expand something like Runescape or Minecraft? That, I'm interested in.