Internship at Little Chicken

February 19, 2012

Soon after the jam I started on my last semester of my studies and my planned internship at Little Chicken Game Company in Amsterdam. Among other work, I will be doing research on and developing a standard, flexible, and easy to use system to handle persistence in games, in the Unity environment in particular.

Goals of this project:

1. Standard system: Take care of all the little details and make the game developer's life easier when dealing with persistence in games.
2. Generic: Relevant and usable in as wide variety of use cases and types of games as practically possible, though there will always be exceptions.
3. Simplicity: Adding extra types of persistent game elements should be intuitive and involve minimal effort, and minimal intrusion into the rest of a project's code base.
4. Flexibility: Easily adapted to situations requiring different forms of serialization or data storage.

The past weeks I have mostly been getting acquainted with the environment, setting up my workstation, and writing my project initiation document. I have also poked around at the existing code base to get familiar with the current project my solution will be integrated with.

I plan to do some preliminary research on my topic of persistence in games, after which I will develop a number of prototypes. For each prototype I will evaluate its strong points and shortcomings. This way I can iterate towards the final solution.