Feral Interactive

As part of my degree, I successfully completed a placement year in the games industry where I was lucky enough to work for Feral Interactive. Utilising my C++ skills from their office in London I spent the year helping to port games to the Nintendo Switch as part of the programming team. My job title during my placement was C/C++ Programmer 12 Month Placement, and during the year I learnt a lot about C++ as a whole and memory management in C++.

During my placement I worked independently to resolve several bugs on the games. I kept up to date with what the other members of the team were working on while assisting several members of the team with issues they were having on specific bugs. This taught me valuable lessons about working in as part of a team in a business environment as opposed to in an academic setting. My placement allowed me to work with tools such as svn (a version control system) and Jira in a professional setting.

Towards the end of my placement my contract was extended by a month due to how competent I am and the company’s desire to keep me onboard for as long as possible. 

I am under an NDA with Feral Interactive so I cannot talk in detail about what I did during my time there but I have summarised what I worked on for each project below.

During my placement year I spent most of the time working in a team porting Company of Heroes from Windows to the Nintendo Switch. I solved many bugs and issues while working on the Company of Heroes Collection including issues related to controllers disconnecting, the game not pausing when docking the Switch, localisation issues and changing how the save system operated in order for it to work on the Nintendo Switch.

Towards the end of my placement I worked in another team to port Hitman Blood Money to the Nintendo Switch. During my time helping to port Hitman Blood Money to Switch I helped solve several UI issues and helped to lay the foundation for a better localisation system including making a date localiser for the Feral libraries that can be used in all of the company's future projects.