An internship – ohh just another course required before the bachelor thesis. Oh boy was i wrong. The internship for me was everything but just another course. But to talk about what i did, i have to start from the beginning.

Finding an Internship

Two things i was certain about i wanted to do with my internship. First – staying within the field i want to specialize in. Namely tool development for games. Secondly i wanted to get practical experience working in a real company. So an internship at my local university was not an option.

It took me almost half a year of searching and applying to game studios until the day finally came. It was on the GermanDevDays, a conference where studios may present their newest developments, that i got a glance at a very interesting game. Dungeon Full Dive – a VR adaptation of Dungeons and Dragons. After testing it and talking to the lovely people of TxK Gaming Studios. My interest of applying for an internship was gigantic. I got to see and talk a bit about the custom tools they use to, for example create their characters and items. I knew i had found a studio that uses tools exectly like i wanted to to.

Once home i immediately got to writing my application. Of course due to the almost half a year preparation, i got the email out fast. And just as fast, i got a reply. After having multiple interviews the big news finally came. I got accepted as a tool developer.

The Internship

I had a great feeling starting my internship. The interviews where great, i had experience in the field and i prepared myself as much as possible. So what could go wrong – again i was wrong. All my prior experience of working with companies where as sort of external contractors. And i would never have thought that being part of a company would differ that greatly. The starting week went great, i got some smaller tasks to get to know the team, the project and my role in the team. But once the first tasks where done and my first pull requests where reviewed i realized that i did not know as much as i thought. From basic things i thought i always used correctly like the debugger over more complex things like allocating too much memory or even, for me at this time, annoying things like code convention – i had to learn it from scratch.

But even through the ups and downs my internship had, i had some great mentors in the team of TxK Gaming Studios. They taught me extremely valuable knowledge. And looking bad i am utmost greatful for all the things they pointed out to me that i did wrong. With this i could improve and also learn to appreciate annoying things like code conventions. I am truly thankful for the time of my internship.

Sadly i cannot talk too much about the work i have done in my internship. But my main focus was on creating tools to improve the workflow of the other developers. This reached from implementing smaller functions to creating a greater system to automate the import process of assets.

Dungeon Full Dive

If you would like to experience DFD for yourself you can have a look at the Webiste of Dungeon Full Dive or go over to Steam and download the playable game.