Wrap-up: MacGDA Job Shadow Program

Editor’s Note: The below is a guest article from Thrive Games.

The event itself was organized by MacGDA (McMaster Game Development Association) and ran from February 16-20, 2015. The association reached out to three local game development studios (Uken, Snake Head Games, and Thrive Games) and asked if they would allow students to come into their offices to experience what it is like to work in the video game development industry.

Thrive Games brought on three McMaster students, Sahajmeet Bhutta, Theo Stone, and Matthew Paine, and hosted them in our offices for a week. Michael Huynh hosted a lecture series about the fundamentals of Java programming, and guided the interns as they made a functioning clone of the classic game “Asteroid”. The task was itself fairly simple and only took two days time to code the bare bones of the game. On the third day, the students switched roles – and got a chance to lead the project team. Each intern had a day in the project manager role where they came up with new features to be implemented in the game – they distributed work, took the lead in decision making, and managed the code from the two other students merging it into a cohesive project.

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