Introduction

As I graduated ISART Digital with a full internship hour quota in June 2020, I received an answer from a past application for a QC Project Manager Internship at Bandai Namco Entertainment Europe. I made sure with my school that they could provide me a second internship contract for them. I learned the good news from both parties a few weeks later, and as I was finishing my Level Design internship at Anotherbrain, I got prepared to move to Lyon, in Rhône-Alpes, and start a 5 months internship on the following Monday. I joined a team of QC Project Managers, under the lead of Olivier Robin, working closely with Localization Project Managers, Release Managers and Producers. This was my very last internship, and by far my favorite.

Projects

During my 5 months spent there, I’ve been multipurpose as ever. Occasionally, I gave a helping hand to my fellow Project Managers on their projects (Little Nightmares 2, Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot, Captain Tsubasa, and others…); more frequently, I’ve worked on a few QA-specific tasks that weren’t linked to a specific project (but I’ll talk about this later); and most of the time, I’ve been focusing on two games: Project Cars 3 and The Dark Pictures: Little Hope. This section is dedicated to those two projects.

Project Cars 3

Pitch

Project Cars 3 is a racing video game, developed by Slightly Mad Studios and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. It was released on August 28th 2020 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Journey from weekend warrior to racing legend & experience the thrill & emotion of authentic racing. Own, upgrade and personalize hundreds of cars, customize your driver, tailor every setting & play the way you want in YOUR Ultimate Driver Journey.

Production

A few weeks after I joined the company, just before the release of the game, my coworker Aurélie Baudy, whom worked closely with me during the entirety of my internship, asked me to assist her on certain specific tasks. For a whole month, I was at first helping her throughout several different steps of project managing. Once she felt that I learned how to perform each one of these tasks, she let me work freely on Project Cars 3. Obviously, I would have her review each decision I was taking, yet I still had the chance to communicate with every team without restraint: external testers, release manager, product owner and producers from both Bandai Namco and Slighly Mad Studios.

My typical day on Project Cars 3 would follow this schedule:
I start my day by catching up with mails coming from BNEA (America) and BNEI (Japan) in order to check the current status of game testing in other regions. Once all of my mails are read, I would prepare the Daily Report from the past day. This Report would include number of worked hours, progression on testing, ticket numbers, comments. As I prepare the Daily Report, I check the testers progression and adapt what their work for the day would be. Regarding testers in later time zones, they would be warned the day before on what to focus on. Regarding our testers that would start their day after us, I’d usually send them a message in the morning when they get in office. Once the program of the day is setup for all of our testers, I would spend some time working on other tasks/projects for the rest of the morning. As communication is key, I stay available and updated on the testers progression throughout the day on Skype.
On a weekly basis, I would update the internal document that kept track on how many testers we would have by platform and game mode or test plan. Then, I would re-evaluate my needs for the following week, as my goal would be to have the right amount of testers to cover everything we need without spending too much of the QA budget allocated for this game. For obvious reasons, I would communicate each one of my ideas and decisions to Aurélie, and she would make suggestions on what to do.
Usually, after 3pm, I would start reviewing bug tickets sent by testers. Unless if the team encounters a crash or what they would consider a Must Fix, this would be my first look at the spotted bugs. Otherwise, I’m immediately warned by the QA team leads and would share the information with Aurélie and the Producer as well. Once all tickets are organized, I would review the QA Team Daily Report and would start preparing BNEE’s QA Daily Report.

I’ve started working on PC3 before it released, but I started being autonomous around September. Starting at that time, and until the end of my internship, I’ve been focusing on the release of two DLCs: the Legends Pack and the Style Pack.

As I’m under NDA, I can’t share other tasks about this project, or any of the documents that I’ve produced.
Even though I’m not really into racing games, I hold this game close to my heart as it taught me so much about game development.

The Dark Pictures: Little Hope

Pitch

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope, also known simply as Little Hope, is an interactive drama survival horror video game developed by Supermassive Games and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment.

Trapped and isolated in the abandoned town of Little Hope, 4 college students and their teacher must escape the nightmarish apparitions that relentlessly pursue them through an impenetrable fog.

Production

As my main project was Project Cars 3, I spent less time working on Little Hope. Just like for Project Cars 3, I would review bug tickets, as Aurélie would manage the team. I’ve also helped the Certification team by performing a disc verification process on Xbox, which is one of the tasks that I’ve never performed before. A few times a week, I would also share data from Jira to different Producer and Managers from the bug database. After the game released, on Halloween Day, I kept working on it for just a few weeks before fully transitioning to Project Cars 3 and other QA tasks.

Overall Gained Experience

This experience being my first one in Project Management, I felt like I was discovering an entire new area of Quality Control and Video Game Development that I couldn’t quite understand without actually working in it.

One of my achievements working on this game was to quickly adapt to Bandai’s work methods, and to easily get along with our external teams. Even though I was an intern with no professional experience as a Project Manager, our testing teams were understanding and respecting my choices. This feeling was going both ways as I would ask for suggestions and advices from them occasionally.

I also felt a lot of respect coming from my Quality Control team, and it encouraged me to always give my best. They knew that I was always eager to help and learn more, and I’ve been thrilled to discover more of each one’s responsibilities and challenges.