Jamie’s Intern Experience

Posted 2013-10-01 15:57:34 by Jamie

Over this summer, I worked for Opposable Games at the Bristol Games Hub.

To put it briefly, it was tremendous fun.

It wasn’t my first taste of game development – I made small games in Flash as a youngster and I developed a game with five others last year as part of my Computer Science course. But this was my first professional experience. Last year wasn’t that fun. In fact, it was downright frustrating at times. An unbalanced team made it more of an exercise of politics than progress – but it was character building, and it taught me a lot about how to be adaptive in the face of constant setbacks. My hard work paid off in the end.

Working for a real company with real professionals, it gets better. As the intern, I started as the weakest link in the chain – and if you’re willing to learn then that’s the best position to be in. I’ve learned a considerable amount about developing in a small team, managing responsibility and thinking ahead – skills that would have come in incredibly handy during last year’s game development project. That said, this job would not have been possible without the skills I scratched together during that project – so it’s all rather cyclic.

There’s a lot more to developing a small game than meets the eye. You see a simple game on the internet and you think “yeah, that’s easy, I can knock that up in an afternoon”. But you can’t. Behind that small game there is a developer, an artist, a composer, and sometimes more than one of each. It is possible to make a game by yourself – but it takes serious time. And while a game may look simple, it has taken a long time to iron out the things that make a game seem complex and counter-intuitive, and to keep the vital components that make for a positive experience.

Games aren’t just faceless pieces of software. I don’t know of any other form of media where different disciplines are combined together quite so perfectly. Raw creativity and complex technicality. It has to run efficiently and look good, but more importantly it has to play positively on the emotions of human beings. This requirement doesn’t really apply to other areas of software – I don’t value a particular office application for its ability to take me on an emotional rollercoaster.

All in all, my parting word is that a stint working in game development, or even a bit of brief experimentation, is strongly recommended. I gained a lot of useful experience, kept my mind sharp for the start of my fourth and final University year, and met some great people along the way.

-Jamie (intern)