It's been a while! Overview of Summer

So, It has been a while since I’ve posted on my blog since finishing first year. I’ll admit, I have not practiced as much as I would like to, being very busy with work, but I have had an eventful and insightful Summer which I believe has helped me in other ways and helped prepare me for what I might expect in the industry in the future.

Similarly to last year, I worked at Jagex Games Studio in Cambridge for the duration of my Summer again as a Junior QA Analyst. The position was quite similar to my roll last year, except this year working for a different game, which was almost like working for a different company entirely and quite enlightening to see how different teams in the company approach different projects.

This Summer I worked on the game title RuneScape, which is Jagex’s main headlining game. Over my time at Jagex, I worked in various different scrum teams, each with different projects and aims to provide content for the game. For example, the first team I had worked with, The Guardians, focused on major updates to the game, such as quests or new environments, whereas the second team I worked with, Ninja, was more QOL focused and added small but plentiful updates and fixes to the game to improve the player’s experience.

Over my time working at Jagex this year, I have learnt a great deal in comparison to the previous year. The main differences being the work-flow. Whilst I was working on Transformers Universe, our team operated under a waterfall system; features and updates would be created, and then they would be sent over to the QA team to test and send back. This year, working on RuneScape, we operated in scrum teams, each team had their own set of artists, developers, project leads and testers assigned to a specific project, and we would work as a team creating and testing things as they were produced.

This kind of workflow allowed me to become part of projects a lot more; I was able to provide feedback, fix issues and even occasionally create assets when artists did not have enough time. I found there was no lack of opportunities, and once every two weeks everyone had a whole day to dedicate to doing what ever they wanted, as long as it was helping themselves in one way or another. I took these opportunities to learn the basics of the in-house software, such as the map editor and texturing tools. I tried my best to read the script, which I had a basic understanding of, but would have liked to improve further if I had stayed longer.

I very much enjoyed my time at Jagex, and was sad to leave, as it almost feels like home now. I am hoping that all of my new found knowledge of the Game industry will help me during the next two years, especially with the upcoming group projects.

Unfortunately, as of now I do not have any examples of assets I have created as they have yet to be put into the game, but I thought it would be nice to put in an image of a piece of content I helped creating; I tested the environment and also fixed numerous graphical bugs, including unwrapping and recoloring all of the buildings to be compatible with 3DS Max which the company is now using instead of it's old inhouse tool, which is slightly outdated and doesn't allow as ease of use in comparison. RuneScape graphics come in both low and high quality, so for each model every building has to have a textured high-detail version, and a non-textured low-detail version which is just coloured using poly colours, and I spent quite a while going around the whole city, adjusting textures and coloring all of the buildings poly colours, ready for low-detail.

Hopefully I will be able to expand on this post if any of my creations are added into the game in the future. :)