Unit CIU310 : Internship Experience Journal.

Summary of the Company BlueMonocle Software is an indie company established in Dubai in the year 2018. The company is involved in very diverse fields of software development such as computer application development, mobile application development, event attraction application development, videogame development etc. The company undertakes multiple B2B business projects and servers the clients with requirements and necessities. I have worked for BlueMonocle Software before on a Mobile Application called Beautify which was a client project. The project was basically a booking app were the customers can book hours and products from the store. So I should say I knew the company from before and also the means they generate income and their business strategies. Although B2B projects is a very solid source of revenue the companies main goal is to develop its own Consumer Software Products, mainly video games for both mobile and PC. As of now BlueMonocle Software is undertaking the development of the consumer product(video games). One of them is "BlackSky", which is a mobile game thats like a puzzle and memory game, It was in development from the year 2018 onwards. Actually project BlackSky was the project that kickstarted BlueMonocle Software Company, From there the project gained traction among his collogues and friends and sparked the idea of establishing a company form there on. Many of my friends and acquaintance work there. And the other is called "Bugged Dungeon" which is an puzzle game which was concieved during a Game Jam held in the year 2020 by Global Game Jam. the project was developed by a two member team consisting of Mustafa and Elijah Araza who worked as the tech lead and artist for the game. The game is planned to be released on the steam for sale, as of now the company is on a rush in development as they are clossing on the release date. And last but not the least, "Donjon Rampage" which an isometric puzzle game whos lead developer is my friend Aniket. as the Project is lead by my buddy I happened to get constant update on how its going and have managed to give a few suggestions on the way. Currently the company is moving Abu Dhabi due to an offer provide by the government through twoFour54, which is a government establishment that exists to elevate and support the media and entertainment industry based in Abu Dhabi.

Summary on your Mentor/Supervisor

Mustafa Sibai. the founder and CTO of BlueMonocle Software was the one who supervised me during my internship at BlueMonocle Software. He is an extremely talented and versatile programmer with years of coding experience on his belt. Elaborating on his experience, He have made a game engine from scratch known as Blue Flame Engine which is capable of allowing users to make both 2D and 3D games on it, also to note, its completely written in C++ and does impliment Entity-Component-System Style of programming which makes his engine incredibly faster, much more faster that what a normal style of programing can achieve. Also to mention, have have manage to make several games and publish in on mobile application distribution stores in the past years while working in multiple companies in both Dubai and abroad. He have gotten interview from Google and from several other companies including Paradox entertainment Sweden. But he had different plans an he say that he like to do things his way. Speaking of his character, he has a very friendly and helpful personality. He is very open minded and naturally benevolent in character. He have managed to help me in couple of situations before as well even while I was not his employee or working for him at the time. Now coming to the main reveal, He was my tutor for the past four years, and I should credit him for teaching me C++, C#, Networking, Server Programming, Photon Networking, Multithreading, Shader Programming and Computational arithmetic. His teaching style is very understandable and intuitive to me. He is a teacher who is capable of bring the topic to students level and not the student to the topic, by which I mean that his explanation is very intuitive to consume. During my time at BlueMonocle Software, he managed to help me with several concepts epically in JavaScript and Backend Development. I use this opportunity thank him for introducing and teaching me React Native Expo, out of which I managed to find a job at a local company were I am working during the time of writing the document. He provided me with all sorts of learning documents and recourses for achieving the tasks that I have to do at BlueMonocle Software. Also a small trivia about him which is that the love the game Final Fantasy, and he even name himself fantasy, mainly due to the amazing experience it offered and the level of detail put into the game. Speaking in general, he Is an amazing person to work with.

Internship (Your duties and responsibilities)

I was responsible of quite a number of tasks during my time at BlueMonocle Software, but I should say that I enjoyed each and every one of it. To give a brief of my specialty, I and an all rounded game programmer with training in all the major fields of game development. But Technical Art is my specialty and I have spend the majority of my past two years focusing and learning about it. Technical art is all about rendering and displaying Geometries, Textures and Pixel and Data processing at the GUP level, in simple terms its the branch of computer programming that deals with what ever that gets displayed onto the screen. So speaking of that, that was exactly my main task the BlueMonocle Software company. I was made in charge as the Lead Technical art for BlackSky project. The first task I got was to make a shader for a slime monster boss for a certain level. Slime as most might know is a semi-solid substance with magnificent optical properties like refraction, reflection, glossiness, chromatic aberration etc. I was a challenge not in terms of mathematics but in terms of the choices out there. Personally I felt that the greatest challenge in technical art once after you know mot of the techniques and mathematical operations is to settle on an art-style for a game whos art style is not predefined by the development team. So far the best solution for this dilemma is to aske the concept artist if there is one to draw a sketch of the specific effect/objects appearance fitting and matching to the existing general esthetics of certain project. But sadly sometime there wont be a concept artist to do it for you, so what would do then. I would suggest you to look at the prominent props in the project like the spacecraft or the main character in the game and try to mimic the optical property and outline. So here in my case I was given a concept art of a slime monster deigned by the concept artist. And i followed it and I managed to make a wobbly, wet and glossy slime monster. The lead programmer had a few suggestion and had found a few issues while importing the package so later the next week I resolved it and send the new file which was working fine. Then I got a new kind of task which was to make Visual Effects for the game, Visual Effects in games are mostly done using something as particle systems, particle systems are basically floating quads with textures on it. I was asked to make Visual Effects for an explosion of the death of the slime boss and his projectile firing. also the next week I was asked to make Visual Effects for the achievements and minigames within the game. I was also assigned a task with one of the game developers, specifically speaking Odera. To fix an issue with layering in the dual channel post-processing offered by Unity Universal Rendering pipeline which was extremely limiting in the sense of possibilities open to the developer for mixing and matching effects for outside the box ideas. In overall I was working on Shaders, Visual Effects and Post-effects for the which was very enjoyable to me as I love Technical Art. I main thing that made the situation and experience much different for me this time is the fact the due to all sorts of Covid-19 restrictions the travel and interaction have limits due to the laws imposed to make sure of the safety of the people. There for I should admit that I really missed out the classic office/workplace experience that found mostly at institutions.

Conclusion

I should admit that I am lucky to get an Internship at BlueMonocle Software due to several reasons. First of all I got a hands on experience on a project that soon to be released. Secondly I got to work with the amazing team at BlueMonocle Software which includes artists, programmer, leads and audio engineers. Mainly I got to observe a proper iterative process and the systems in use to make the production/ development process smooth. Also contrary to my expectation it was much easier to work with the work log and timing system provide by the company which was straightforward and clean. I also came to the understanding that the development of a project takes a lots of coordination, lost effort, lots of hand and lots of hearts working in harmony, in sync and in rhythm like planning music in an orchestra. Understanding and Communication plays a great and crucial role in making this machine function, just like how a human body works. Every institution has a structure to its chain command and its form of hierarchies. Respecting and understanding the structure of it becomes key in succeeding as an employee in a institution. When It come to finding a job in Dubai my experience has always been horrible due to the fact I lack both wa-sa-ta(connections) and social-creds needed to be desirable and therefor get big connection and in-turn great referral. If you don't get what I say come here and learn how things work here. Iven this job which I manage to get can be counted as a result of building connection with Mustafa as a student. One strange thing that I came to understand is that landing a job these days has nothing to do with the experience and skill you posses, nowadays it seams like building network is more important, and employers hire someone they know. Also to note that politics in a company is such a weird thing to experience and traverse through. Thankfully I a paradise compared to establishments with above mentioned characters. Also what i noticed is that if the culture in a place is lazy and liturgic, they wont be looking for creative and talented people who could win a war for them but instead people who are fun to chill with and whom they think can fit with their social circle and be invited to their place and be introduce to their friends and feel proud about it. As an immigrant here, and also with a third world branding, I should admit its totally fun. Even the pay-range is set different based on your nationality which is strange and disgusting, guess some unwritten rules are nastier than others. Also to whomever reading this entry, its very important that you interview your employer. Because you will be working "under him" which means that you need to be careful that who is the person you are working for. Also you need to make sure that your employers is levelheaded and not a bigot who had all those outdate world views. But thanks God I appreciate the culture of BlueMonocle Software, one of which is the fair and humane treatment I got form the Administration of the company, which is kind of rare thing in some part of the world. I never felt like I am being exploited by the company and the Administration was co-operating and was at ease in making sensible negotiations.