SEED: Software Development at DFL

Christine T Tran

Contact: LinkedIn

My internship at the Digital Future Lab began late June 2019 and ended mid-September 2019. During that time, I worked as a Quality Assurance Tester on the second iteration of a reverse tower defense game called, SEED (neo). As a QA, I was tasked with testing, logging, and verifying bugs in the game to on GitLab to ensure that game mechanics were being implemented correctly and the user experience is smooth. I also play-tested many levels and provided feedback to the design team to further improve level design within the game.

The biggest task I was assigned was to write a unit test for the ProgressSaver class with another QA. This class is in charge of saving the player’s progress within SEED. The script needed to verify that the class initializes, saves, and updated the highest level completed correctly. I spoke with the lead developer to learn how to set up the unit test so that my code could utilize the Zenject plugin and follow the coding style of previous developers. This task helped me explore and learn how to use the unit testing feature of Unity and Visual Studios Live Share as I worked with the other QA.

Being a QA helped me learn to interact and communicate with multidisciplinary teams because I was constantly testing and verifying work from all teams (e.g. developers, design, art, audio, etc.). I was able to learn and explore Unity and SourceTree when I fixed small bugs for the development team, such as broken animations. I also used SourceTree for testing different level designer’s branches. Interning at the Digital Future Lab has taught me how to use many organization tools, technical/communication skills, and how to work in a diverse environment.