End of the summer internship – Pedro’s Journey

They say “all good things come to an end”, but do they? The Mimicry 2017 summer internship ended last Friday. For a period of 3 months, José Vieira and Pedro Oliveira have been part of the development team, pouring their hearts and souls into Ganbatte by learning, falling, getting up, socializing, playing, and above all; working very hard to get most out of the 3 months.

We’ve asked them to share their experience with the world, in the form of a classic game industry practice: the writing of a game development postmortem. A postmortem is a project retrospective which is usually written at the end of project, in this case it applies to the end of the summer internship. Postmortems mainly revolve around the “5 wrongs, 5 rights” concept, and this is exactly what this blog post is about. What went right, and what went wrong according to these young game developers? Their postmortems provide unique, unfiltered insights into what the experience was like. Since the reflections are of a reasonable size, we’re posting one at a time. Pedro; the keyboard is yours.

 

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Summer Internship Postmortem – My first perspective as a game developer

by Pedro Oliveira

I’m a few minutes away of finishing my Internship, therefore this seems to be the correct moment to think a little bit about all my process around the past 3 months in the form of a postmortem.
First of all, I want to make it clear, this internship might be a completely different experience from what you are going to do.
Not less important, this postmortem, only talks about my perspectives and experiences, it does not make right or wrong decisions.
Finally, this postmortem will present, the way I took this internship and what I have learned with that.

Project goals and mine

My summer internship was in Mimicry company, that works mainly with VR devices to create games. Mimicry wanted to create a game within the internship period, based on the themes cats, sushi and space. In line with the company objectives this game was built with VR in mind.
For me, this internship would provide an adequate learning on the principles of creating video games, as well as, the privilege of having my first experience in a video game development studio.

Project scenario and boundary conditions

To think that the project started on July 19, 2017, makes me wonder how far we’ve progressed. But I have to admit, that at the beginning I was scared, I had never participated in anything of the kind, and my knowledge on the subject was minimal. I would say this was my first barrier. Do not get me wrong, the team is awesome, I suffered because although I did not have the talent to respond to what was asked of me, it was something that I really wanted! So I dived head first to get the results I wanted and be somehow proud of my process.

Tools used

Software/Middleware:

Visual Studio Community 2013, Unreal Engine 4, Blender, Audacity, Gimp, Slack, Blocks.

Hardware:

Desktop with 2 Dell screens, 8GB RAM, i5-4670k, Radeon(TM) RX 480, 232 GB SSD running Windows 10 & 465 GB local disk.

Where

The studio is located in the Instituto Pedro Nunes, in the street Pedro Nunes in Coimbra. A wide space where we can easily use VR devices and where there are several other growing companies where we can get in touch and make new professional friendships.

The Rights

I will now describe 5 points that I considered relevant at this stage without a specific order.

1- Idea maturation

We quickly managed to think of several elements that we thought were relevant to the game, through the process of brainstorming and some concepts in order to close the core mechanics.
We went through several elements of reflection, such as thinking about how the game can be thought for VR, the visual representation of the game, whether the same would be cartoonish, or something in between. The types of sushi we wanted to implement, as well as the color of the dishes and their values. Variations of cat types that we would like to implement, so that game was considered fun.

2- Team, plus Family

I’ll take this with me, if there is something that I will never forget about this internship, it will be the Mimicry team, definitely.
The whole team is respectful, and above all cheerful, trying to ensure that everyone is well with a big smile on their faces. Whenever we had a problem that we didn’t know how to solve, the multidisciplinary team was always ready to help.

3- Logo Creation

This, I would say, was my first achievement in the Ganbatte project, from the choice of the name, which was born at the time I was looking for a sounding name for the descending countdown in the beginning of the game, which turned out to be challenging, we ended up choosing Ganbatte as the name of the game and its respective brand. Having the name of the game, made the rest of the process simpler since we already knew the energy that we wanted to transfer to the logo. The selection process was time-consuming but it was worth it, and I was able to make the whole team proud of my work, an aspect that I will also take with me, as an element of my professional development.

4- Character Creation

I always found it very difficult to develop a character with personality, and especially with the character that we wanted to implement in our game. This was the first character I worked on the professional spectrum, which at this time does not yet feel 100% finished, but which has become an element of the family and a symbol of great pride for our team, our first cat called “Dexter”…
His conceptual development was complex, passed through several stages, one of which was the limitation of the use of VR headsets, the color palette and the shape of the head and hands, since these would be elements that the user would interact directly.

5- Inside the game

In this project, I gained a great respect for Unreal Engine, in addition to having in my opinion a very intuitive interface, it helped me understand what were the pipelines needed to move from the role to something real inside the engine. This process gave me the tools and opened a new world of possibilities that will help me in the future, developing of games.

The wrongs

Next, I’ll list 5 points about the internship that were problematic!

1- Not in time

In the beginning, it was difficult to manage and organize the project, as we did not know everything we had to do nor the time it would take. Even if we had an idea, we ended up taking longer than expected, lengthening production time. Over time, some elements appeared which we didn’t take into account in the start, which lead to a well-built but time-consuming process.

2- To be or not to be

We are a new team, so it’s easy to get to the point where we can not come to a conclusion. When this happens, some parts of the development are incomplete, somehow blurring the concept, and making it hard to reach some conclusions.

3- My fur, goodbye

This is a mistake, I don’t consider the title as such, but I want to share it here, there was a huge investment of time in order to be able to work with fur, but it happens that with due to some decisions that led to updating the engine, it ended up being left behind. But we all felt that it was an extremely visual element in our game, getting to the point that we questioned whether we would downgrade or not to maintain it. After some debate we reached the decision that we should maintain the quality but stop wasting any more time on this.

4- Quality of the 3D models

I feel a great pain in the chest when I say this, but I feel that where I failed completely, was in 3D modeling, I feel that I have progressed, but not to the point that this project deserves, and I will have to increase the quality of the models so that they can be part of a great game!

5- Perforce?

One big mistake I made in the entire internship was I did not commit to Perforce to share my work, eventually, another colleague helped me in the task. This is something that I will work in the future more regularly and correctly, because it is also up to the artists to do this task.

Conclusions

I always felt I was able to do things, even though I knew I had not the slightest idea how to do it, thanks to the help I had. A big thank you! I have to say that it was a unique experience, in which I had a lot of fun! and especially in which I learned a lot.
I can’t wait for the release, hopefully with all the quality that this team demands.

Thank you Mimicry! Ganbatte!!!

– Pedro

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Do you have any remarks, or questions that you want to ask Pedro about the internship, his future perspective, or do you need any advice/tips from the team? Join the conversation and write your message down below in the comments.

Thanks for reading, and check back soon for José’s story!

-Thomas