3 month after graduation I started the first step on my career in a game studio. Games on IOS was popular at the time. And building a game of my own has always been a dream of mine.
We had team of twelve, 5 developers and 5 artistes. CEO and the co-founder are the project managers. I was hired as an intern.
The first week was extremely exciting. I got a Mac Pro, a dozen of different IPhones and a few IPads to play with. However all developers were busy. I did not receive any formal training but a list of links to official API documentations from Apple and cocos2d (the game engine we use). The next week I talked to the manager and asked for a project. It turned out that they were waiting for me to speak up.
In the following 4 months, I was completely into all kinds of documentation and tutorials. Everything was new to me, Objective-c, Xcode and cocos2d. There was memory management, game engine concepts, ISO debugging and profiling as well as managing resolution between devices. It was indeed a big challenge and I slowly progressed day by day.
There were some interesting problems to solve . One of them was to combine audio files into a single track, which turn out to be quite an difficult one working with varies compression formats and trying to sync them perfectly. With my limited experience there were a few money leaks which took me a long time to debug.
In the end the app passed testing and was published. I remember testing with everyone in the company trying to break the app. I have to say there were some truly unique ways of using apple products and it was a lot of fun.
Unfortunately, I did not succeed in negotiating a full time role which could also sponsor a visa for me. So I left and start working on the visa.
What I learn from it.
I gained significant amount of confidence in my ability to learn with the release of the game Kids Music Factory. And the experience also showed me how development team in game studio operates. What I regret is my negligence in people. I was not social at all in the team because I was 100% dedicated in building the app.