Software Engineer Games and Gaming Lab

The games and gaming lab in Glasgow university is dedicated to research in all things video games. Some research papers include the effect of mental health across different games and genres, experimenting with how new technologies can increase gaming immersion, as well as building educational games.

I was placed in Ateam1, a prototype development team which aims to quickly create games to showcase and advertise. I got work in a wide variety of sectors, including educational, nuclear, and security.

An example of a project I worked on was TEMPEST, a climate game where future leaders need to make important decisions to handle the city of Glasgow being flooded. I used pygame, a module within python that handles game development, to create a 2D board game. This board can be used to create cities and run simulations. This was a large project with a lot of moving parts, but unfortunately, I am not allowed to discuss this in detail.

In this internship, my main contribution was to TEMPEST, mostly coding both the front end and back end. Furthermore, while working accross multiple different projects, I noticed repeated code so I build a games and gaming module that provided quick start up tools for games development use. This included menus, handeling simulation data, as well as creating fully customisable checkered boards and pieces for board games.

My role, on top of assisting with the development process, was to communicate with the client to understand what they want and how the the projects are developing. I was also in charge of managing 3 github repositories. This included creating milestones, managing issues, resolving merge conflicts, and providing code reviews.