About my internship:
This internship has been a pleasant journey in an area yet unknown to me before: the publishing of video games.
The experience taught me that I have to look beyond the horizon of 'just' releasing a game and instead keep in mind different platforms and their requirements, localization, testing partners and the process around them, age ratings and packaging if releasing a physical edition.
Company: SOEDESCO, publisher
Primary Role: Producing Intern
Duration: September 2020 - October 2021
Country: The Netherlands
Featured Games: Kaze and the Wild Masks, Monster Crown, Dog Duty, Truck Driver, Hammerhelm.
Website: https://www.soedesco.com/
Responsibilities Publishing (21 Weeks):
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Sanity Checks
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Localization Support
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CQA/FQA Support
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Communication with localization and testing partners
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Age Ratings
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General Testing
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Packaging Inlays Checks
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Security Protocol
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Terminology List & Naming Conventions
Testing
A large part of this internship has been spent testing; doing sanity checks, where I look at the basics the game should require before even thinking about passing it to be published to the audience, and other types of tests where I will need to find out how to reproduce a bug, find out why something works for developers and not for us, or check whether everything we had agreed upon for a certain milestone is present.
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Localization and QA Support
These tasks mostly include transferring lines or bugs from one place to another, adhering to both the testing/localization partner's and the developer's requirements. Testing partners may have their own tools to track bugs whereas the developer might prefer a different medium.
Furthermore, I supported the responsible producer with draft e-mails containing the most important issues or containing a request for one of our contacts.
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The partners we were working with for localization and QA also required direct communication from the publisher and I have been in charge of this multiple times, forwarding important information to the producer in contact with the developers and providing the information the partner would need.
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Age Ratings
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For this particular task, I had to fill in forms for different age ratings containing all pertinent content as well as record footage showing what was necessary, provided with timestamps. It is important to be very detailed and precise with this work as it may result in quite a fine when you miss out on important information.
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Packaging
When a game will have a physical release, it is necessary to be checked to ensure it will be able to enter the market or it might be rejected by several instances as there are some rules that apply to the inlays of the packaging. I have checked a few of those inlays; seeing to it that everything is present and as it is supposed to be.
Security Protocol, Naming conventions and Terminology List
Whenever there was time left and there were no high priority tasks coming in, I worked on these three tasks. I had worked with naming conventions before, but the terminology list was an interesting experience as it has given me insights in many new terms and abbreviations. The Security Protocol was something I also had never set up yet before, but taught me how to work more carefully with sharing sensitive information as I was the one to explain it in this document.
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Responsibilities Studios (ongoing):
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Product Backlog
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Sprint Analysis
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Several Design Tasks
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Pipelines
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Testing
