In my first school year I was very busy finding an internship, preferably at a game company. After various applications I’m very happy I became an intern at Grendel Games. When my internship was over I proudly got a 7,5 from them, I was rated as a HBO student because they were not used to MBO Programmers as interns.
Grendel Games is a company in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands. They are a company that develops many Serious games and are recently famous with their game Underground which is a game that won 2 awards at the dutch game awards. For more information you can go to their website http://www.grendel-games.com.
I can’t provide any source code but I can tell what I learned and worked on.
This was my first internship so I learned a lot like:
- Scrum Method
- Teamwork
- Dealing with critism
- Version Control with SVN
At Grendel Games I’ve worked on 2 games. “Gearlân” and “Gryphon Rider” (which is now known as Oath of the Gryphon).
Gearlân is a Multiplayer Stratagy game to learn the Frisian language. For this game I’ve been working in HTML5/JavaScript using Enchant.js. With Gearlân there are also 3 smaller single player games where I also worked on.
I haven’t worked on something big before. I have plenty experience with JavaScript already, so it was amazing to work in a big project like this for the first time, having many classes to work with. Here are some tasks I’ve done for Gearlân and it’s 3 mini games.
- Programming various gameplay elements
- Programming the menu
- Adding hud elements
- Adding / Programming audio
- Programming particles
I learned…
- Game Development in JavaScript with Enchant.js
- Reckon with the server, making sure everything is compitable for online multiplayer. With node.js.
- Working together.
- Object Oriented Programming with Javascript: bigger than any of my object oriented projects I’ve done for school.
- Enumerations, something simple I haven’t used much before and I now love.
- JSON
For the second game I worked on at Grendel Games, Gryphon Rider, it was quite a big switch from javascript to Unity3D / C#. Unity3D is something I haven’t used on school yet.
Gryphon Rider is in development for children with a balance disorder, the game uses kinect to detect movement.
I did various things for Gryphon Rider.
- Various gameplay elements, both with Kinect and Gamepad/Keyboard.
- Detecting movements with kinect
- NPC Conversation & Quest system
- Inventory / Pickup system
- Adding the Memento Design Pattern
- Adding a “Save” button to the transform editor when in runtime. Pressing this will save changes you made in runtime.
I learned a lot!
- A lot about Unity3D (As it was totally new for me!) Basic examples would be Prefabs, Character behaviour, Camera, and the editor.
- Creating an UML Diagram for the first time.
- About Design Paterns
- Generic Type Paramenter
- Extending the Unity3D Editor
While I can’t submit code or a unity web player for gryphon rider and gearlan. In my internship I programmed for some gamejams I did with Grendel Games which I can submit:
For this game called “NomNomNom” I’ve programmed the player movement. (Walking/Running & Jump)
Controls:
– Use your mouse to look around
– Hold left mouse button to run
– Press space to jump
– Left alt to stun enemies
Everything costs energy. You have good & bad energy. Get hamburgers for bad energy (too much of this will make you fat & slower) and get fruit for good energy.