Forza Horizon 5 | 05/06/2022 - 05/06/2023
In June 2023 I completed a year long placement at Xbox Games Studio's Playground Games - best known for the award winning Forza Horizon franchise. During my time at Playground I was involved end to end with shipping Forza 5's Rally Adventure DLC on Xbox and PC, implenting features for rolling seasonal content such as Event Lab 2.0, and working to improve the stability of the game using player emulation testing via Microsoft’s Intelligent Bot Automation toolset.
At Playground Games, I learned a ton about C++, C# and software development in general. I took part in engineering practices such as scrum, contributed to a live game and experienced the full development cycle of an AAA product. Furthermore, the experience I gained at Playground gave me the confidence to write my own C++ ECS engine "Nabi".
As mentioned above, key to my role at Playground was ensuring the stability of the game using player automation testing using. I wrote and improved a variety of tests - for example a suite to run against the Rally Adventure campaign, bots which played monthly seasonal content and bots to soak test all areas of the game.
My experience at Playground Games was invaluable, and puts me in great place to start my career in the games industry.