I joined Playground Games post-ship of Forza Horizon 4 as an Associate Engineer. This was a contract position as part of my university placement, and my first industry job. I quickly familiarised myself with the most common areas of the toolset and - within 6 weeks - began the proposal for my first entirely new tool, before fully implementing it, testing it, and rolling it out to the users.
As I joined post-ship, the majority of my contributions was support for the live program - monthly content updates. This involved providing on-call tooling support to the other disciplines, which ranged from installation/setup, to debugging bad data, to live-diagnosis and logging of bugs.
My placement was due to end in June 2020, however, due to my performance, Playground Games offered to extend my contract to September 2020 before giving me a permanent position in the team whilst I completed my degree part-time.