In the summer of ‘07, I interned for Electronic Arts at their EA-Chicago location. It was my first corporate software development experience. I worked underneath the lead programmer and technical director for a Marvel Comics fighting game. I worked as a member of the game team to develop in-house tools as well as contribute content and functionality to the game. I created a tool for artists to easily view their work running in the game engine, created another tool to dynamically generate the lowest level of detail skins for characters, and eventually worked as a member of the AI team to implement NPC actions. All of my contributions were implemented, debugged, and profiled up to desired standards using Visual Studio .NET. I saw multiple software development iterations and experienced a handful of “crunch” times.
Unfortunately, Electronic Arts shut down EA-Chicago before the game could be released and canceled their partnership with Marvel, so my work will never see fruition in a published game. It was an invaluable experience, though.
Note the citizens that run around during the in-game play. I worked on debugging their behavior.