Game Programmer
Palindrome Internship
The last thing that I did for my Game Assembly education was an internship. I had the pleasure of joining Palindrome Interactive in Skövde as an intern for seven months between August 2022 and April 2023. I can't talk that much about the details of what I did there due to an NDA, but I will do my best to summarize my learnings below, if somewhat vaguely.
Software
During my first time at Palindrome, I spent a lot of time getting to know the project and the software that was being used by the team. Some of the primary software, except for the game engine, was the version control program called Plastic SCM, a bug reporting tool called Mantis and the scrum board website called Monday.
I had the opportunity to keep working in Unreal Engine 5, which I had begun to learn during the last months at The Game Assembly. I did, however, not work in the same parts of the engine as I had back in school, where I created a few subsystems and more backend-heavy stuff. At Palindrome a substantial section of my work has been visual scripting focused, and I have spent many hours working in widgets and hooking up UI to the logic I or others have written in c++. It was really interesting to learn more about how to effectively communicate information to the player from the designers that I have worked with, and I hope to continue to learn more about this in the future.
Teamwork
My favourite part of this internship was getting to know the team by working closely in different team constellations on varying parts of the game. Often when I had a task, it also involved at least one person from the design team, who where responsible for that part of the game from a design point of view. Sometimes I also worked on bigger undertakings that involved multiple other developers from different parts of the team.
Either way, working together like that always means a lot of communication has to take place, not only at first when the plan ahead is set, but continuously as a key part of the iterative process. To regularly get feedback on my work, from the first draft to a finished feature, gives the work I do meaning, as it puts the code and logic in perspective to what it achieves as a part of something greater.
Internal deadlines
As in most agile environments, the team I was on had multiple internal deadlines during my internship. Just like everyone else on the team, I had tasks that I was responsible for, that I, in dialogue with my mentor, would design and implement my own solutions for. I am proud to say that my creations contributed to and were a part of the game content that was delivered at the end of our internal milestones.
Prototyping
During certain periods, the work we did as a team involved making prototypes for potential new features. We usually did this in small groups of about 2-5 developers each, with even closer communication than usual. I found this to be extra fun and meaningful since this meant that I got to familiarize myself with parts of Unreal and persons in the team that I didn't work with for my usual tasks. I even participated in an in-house game jam for an extra dose of new things and acquaintances.