weltfern Internship

As part of a team consisting of about 10 students I worked in a multitude of roles across various simultaneous projects. The conception of new game ideas and mechanics, creating prototypes inside the Godot game engine, testing existing funtionalities and reviewing the playability and fun of the final products were all part of my position depending on the current project status. For the sake of this introduction I will be focusing on the two main projects I worked on during my internship.

Assemble! transforms the fascination of three-dimensional model building into a virtual reality experience. Players are shown individual parts of a 3D model, arranged on a virtual shelf. These pieces can be freely selected and held to be viewed from every angle. 20 unique models each with different difficulty options to choose from can be experienced casually or against the clock.

The moment I joined the team this project was already mostly done and within the final production cycle. As an outsider I was tasked with repeatedly testing and reviewing the current state of the game and I was able to achieve major improvements for the overall interaction experieence users have with the world and its building blocks. I played through all available stages on a multitude of difficulty levels and searched both for errors within the models themselves as well as problematic moments within the assembly stage like hard to reach or barely visible places.

With the release of Assemble! being completed and most of the team moving on to post-release fixes two newly joined members and me were assigned to work on the follow-up VR project codenamed "Build, Fight, Survive". Players get presented a completely randomly generated terrain before them in which they are tasked to build a base and defense structures to fend off never ending waves of enemies. Jump into the action, fight monsters, collected resources and further upgrade your base to survive even longer.

As the project was still in very early development I had the chance to directly influence the direction of the game's overall design and mechanics. I was tasked with setting up a new VR project inside Godot and prototyping the first gameplay ideas especially focusing on the building and world generation aspects. Working in this small group we each had the possibility to give and receive direct feedback as well as quickly test out ideas and review them within meetings. With Godot being a community-driven open source engine, a huge chunk of my daily routine was spent with reading documentations and trying to understand the different systems offered by the inofficial XR Tools implementation, documenting my newly aacquired knowledge for future work on the project and guiding my other less experienced colleagues.

The project is currently still inside its funding stage with no aimed release date given to the public yet.

• Identifying and addressing issues in existing game concepts
• Independent work and organization within a team
• Structured documentation and dissemination of work results
• Engaging in reasoned discussions of solution approaches within a team
• Game development in the Godot Engine
• Development of procedural generation algorithms
• Creating a VR experience and working with Godots XR Tools