First week done as a Gameplay Programmer Intern at Shiverbug Studios, most of it spent at Develop:Brighton with the team. 😎 Spent a day on the expo floor seeing what studios and tools teams are actually building, and the rest of the time talking to people: grads, programmers, designers, studio leads. Came away with a much better sense of the industry I've just joined. Getting to spend the week with the Shiverbug team was the best part of it. Conversations by the seaside and hanging out in the evenings playing Jackbox were really fun! 😊 Thanks to everyone who stopped to chat. I really loved meeting you all!
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Out of Water · in development
- Studio
- Shiverbug Studios
- Role
- Gameplay Programmer
- Engine
- Unity 6 · C#
- Dates
- 13 Jul to 18 Sep 2026
- Length
- 10 week internship
Out of Water, an original IP
A 3D platformer collectathon built for two players on one sofa, in splitscreen, starring a turtle and a seagull. I was hired for the character and enemy code. By week ten I was also building the tools the level designers work with, running the build, and reviewing everyone else's work:
Characters & enemies
- Component driven state machines for both playable characters and the enemy framework every enemy runs on, from the crabs to a shark that swims, rebuilt from single file controllers
- The splitscreen plumbing underneath co-op: per player device routing, cameras and character swapping. Then a platformer camera rig that follows the floor, not the jump
Tools for the team
- Level design tools the designers build puzzles from: blockout interactables, spline walkways and ring courses, a click to place prop palette, and a prober that runs the characters' own jump maths to show what they can reach
- A dialogue and cutscene system with one component NPC setup, and Elder Trials: timed challenge rooms with medals that hand out new moves as rewards
Build & performance
- Buildmaster for the studio. I set up the git workflow the team follows, reviewed and merged their pull requests, and tagged a playtest build every fortnight
- GPU driven rendering, quality tiers, LOD and culling passes, measured branch to branch with a profiling tool I built. One August clean up took the project from 10.1 GB to 3.5 GB
Presentation & audio
- A UI Toolkit front end on a shared token system: HUD, character select, pause, save slots, a controls tutorial, and accessibility options like a partner marker and an on-screen input overlay
- Water in Shader Graph and custom URP HLSL: caustics, underwater fog, and currents and rafts the characters can ride
Outside the game, I built the studio's website, shiverbugstudios.com, and an internal wiki for the team that turns the design documents into a searchable site, with art renders and item pages pulled straight from the Unity project.
