Toys For Bob Summer Intership

Overview:
Summer of 2018

My Role:
Engineering, game design, user experience work

Description:
Over the summer I spent 10 weeks working at Toys for Bob in Novato, California working on their as of yet unreleased and unannounced project. I ended up working during the time that the rest of the studio was entering the finish stages of the new Spyro the Dragon game, meaning that I ended up working with a much smaller subset of people at the studio. I worked directly with 4 other interns and one of the creative directors, Dan Neil, on a 10 week rapid fire prototyping marathon. When we started we inherited a smaller project that had been iterated on by a larger portion of the studio about a year ago. Over the ten weeks, the first few weeks we spent learning our way around the code base, while playtesting and talking about what kind of projects we could work on for the remainder of our time. As we got into the swing of things we fell into a routine of an early morning stand up every day, during which we talked about our roadmap, plans for the day, and decided what we wanted to get done before playtesting. After that we all broke and worked separately, unless collaboration was required, then reconvened later in the day to talk about our playtest. We always tried to make sure that we had a goal for the playtest, and an empirical way to prove that hypothesis/goal. Sometimes this was as simple as were the changes made positive ones, do they make the game more fun to play, or sometimes we did comparisons of changes and how they affected statistics. My area of focus was more of a technical designer role, as I worked with character design and locomotion.

Lessons Learned:
I learned a lot during my time at TFB, owing mainly to the great people that I got the work with, as well as the environment I was in and the opportunity that was given. Working directly with a creative director can seem a daunting task, but I learned so much from working with him every day. He directly taught me a lot about how game development was done at an industry level, but he also helped me learn more about myself and what I really wanted to do as a developer. I initially was hired as an engineering intern, but ended up doing a lot more design and user experience work, as it interested me more. Dan not only accepted that , he worked with me to formulate a project plan so that I could do what I wanted, while also easily contributing to the team. I learned a great deal over my time there including, Unreal, Perforce, and Jira on the the application side. As a designer I got to work and iterate on character design, level design, balance, user experience, and playtesting. As a programmer I worked in C++ and Blueprints. As a general game dev, I got to practice collaborating with other devs, daily Scrum meetups, white boarding and communicating, and the all encompassing networking. I spent most of the Summer fighting with or against the networking, as it made testing and debugging so much harder than it had to be, but also more rewarding. I ended up being forced to learn a large portion of network theory just to get things working on my machine. Working with such talented people was privilege that I hope I can leverage in the future!