This summer, I was lucky enough to get an internship working as QA at Hi-Rez Studios, an Atlanta based developer behind the MMO shooter Global Agenda. I admit that I was a bit nervous, as a few of my classmates didn’t see the job as the most… respected position. With responses ranging from “Playtesting intern? That sounds like a fancy way of saying coffee boy” to “I hope you enjoy logging map collisions for the next 3 months”, there was a bit of concern that my first job would be far from living the dream.

Thankfully, my experience was nothing of the sort. I felt like I was “one of the guys” after only a few days of work, never once discouraged from discussing refinements that could made to add to the polish of the game with the rest of the team. Even more surprisingly was how my programming experience helped with bug tracking. Even concepts as simple as knowing that the order in which code is written affects the results in-game came in useful during my work. While I did have to deal with a few of the more tedious aspects of QA, it was nothing as extreme as being locked in a room testing which walls I can run through for days on end.

I learned quite a bit about agile development and designing multiplayer games over the summer, and I hope to put this knowledge to good use in the future with personal projects my classmates and I have planned.