Internin' Ain't Easy
The transition from college to the professional world is expected to be difficult, but it is especially so for the aspiring game designer. Many try to get their foot in the door through quality assurance (aka game testing), which more often than not turns out to be a dead end. I was lucky enough to land an internship for UFC 2009 Undisputed immediately after I graduated. But so far, it hasn't been all fun and games.
You see, I'm supposed to be a design intern. But given the needs of development, I'm being used almost entirely as a production intern. Production can be described as the management of budgets, schedules, and personnel, but it also entails anything that needs to be done in order to ship the game on time. For an intern like me, that means a lot of important-but-menial tasks. Taking screenshots & trailer footage, auditing assets, managing data for fighters & sponsors, and other miscellaneousness. Having spent 4 years in college (at USC's Interactive Media Division) actually designing games and voraciously learning anything that I happened to be interested in, I am finding my current job to be unfulfilling, to say the least.
Given that I'm only an intern, I have no problem paying my dues. That being said, I fear that I'm not getting enough design tasks for my superiors to properly evaluate my abilities. If I hope to be employed as a game designer (and not a production manager) at the end of my internship, I have to figure out a way to prove my worth as a game designer. I believe I am capable of contributing so much more to this game than I've been allowed to so far. Something must change...