This week we have a guest blog from John Gregg, who came up from Duncanrig High School in East Kilbride to experience working life at a games studio. John got a chance to work with a few of our departments and learn the ropes of game development. Here's what he got up to...
QA
At first I thought QA would involve playing games all day, but I quickly found out it wasn't so simple! It's not so much about playing the game, it's more about breaking it, then figuring out what exactly went wrong so it can be fixed. My time at QA also helped me really understand the game itself and this was useful knowledge to take with me to the other departments.
Coding
I have used Visual Basic before so have some experience with coding, but this was my first time getting to work with C Sharp. It was interesting to see how different C Sharp was compared to what I was used to, but the coding team walked me through everything. It was also my first time using Unity and it was great to get some practice as Unity is such a major engine across all platforms these days.
Art
Working with the art team really helped me learn a lot, especially the technical aspects of textures and animation. When I first started, these seemed really quite confusing and complex, but after having it explained and trying it for myself it made a lot more sense.
It was really impressive to see all the different tools and programs that the artists used. I had no idea just how many there were!
Design
Something I noticed straight away was how important communication is in design. The designers have to work closely with the other departments and make sure that everything fits their vision.
I think a lot of gamers can take good design for granted and only really talk about it if they think something is designed badly! Designing a game is a huge process and you have to consider everything from the meta-game to balance and how every aspect of the game world affects everything else. Above all, you've got to make it fun and that that's the biggest task of them all!
Thanks for all your hard work this week John, we all hope you go onto a great career in game development!