I worked in a large, multi-disciplined department following Agile methods to deliver maintenance and longer-term project work to support and evolve both RuneScape MMO products. The nature of the internship saw me shadow and adopt collection of roles – from QA (test engineer for website and game clients), to front-end website developer, back-end systems engineer, and aspects of production. In doing so, I came to understand how a mature games studio functions, and was able to contribute to several stages in a publishing pipeline for “living games” to deadlines. The experience was an invaluable introduction to professional work in the games industry, and I threw myself head-first into every opportunity.

My key responsibilities were to:

• Deliver new web-services to meet the evolving needs of our platform
• Deliver new marketing websites and extensions to CMS functionality for editors
• Support the release of new games, providing to DLLs integrate with new web-services
• Support the current games by resolving technical debt – bugs in legacy systems threatening their stability
• Help improve team processes and standards with the introduction of new continuous integration tools

I developed primarily for Java web-servers which exposed APIs consumed by our website front-ends, and the game clients, before moving to a client-side project requiring Javascript (AngularJS) and C++

• The delivery of a (secret) cross-platform software product from ideation to internal beta release, including UX design, business proposal and front-end MVC implementation. Throughout, I strived to deliver creative solutions to complex technological problems, and promote clear communication between teams and stakeholders
• Building a corporate website with accompanying CMS system to brand guidelines, and supporting the delivery of marketing microsites
• The deployment of a refreshed microservice architecture and accompanying RESTful orchestration API to manage accounts databases – working with reverse-proxies (Nginx) and service discovery tools (Consul, Zuul)
• The implementation of automated testing tools and monitoring dashboards to measure the continued health of systems
• Delivering of “lightning talks” on the outcomes of research into risk modelling, asynchronous programming and API design
• Representing the company at conferences, outreach events such as University presentations
• Using personal development time to attain valuable project management skills leading small teams to rapidly prototype games and game services for mobile and web applications