- One of the best ways to learn something like this is to just be given things to do and just to do it.

- I think whats most important is to do what youre passionate about.

See what really excites you and pursue that.

- So a programming job can be really fun.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] On this episode of "STEM Works," we'll visit with a gaming and software development company called LionDragon to learn about career and internship opportunities in the field of software engineering.

Ploy Wandeevong is an intern working on products you might see on your phone one day.

The work of Marlo Ongkingco's internship ensures that software works across devices.

Shane Littlefield is a vice president who oversees the creation of game software.

(upbeat music) - LionDragon takes requests from clients to create software like a website or an app or a game, and works with the client to get that released.

- LionDragon doesn't exclusively do games.

They do a variety of different work.

But luckily the project that they had for us was a game.

- We're a full-service dev, art, engineering studio.

We create software engineering apps for whatever you need.

(upbeat music) Day to day, I'm overseeing the employees, meeting with potential clients, overseeing work that's been done locally and abroad.

- I work with my fellow software engineers to create a piece of software, whether it be a website, a game, or an app, something they can use on your phone or on your computer.

- I work on a variety of development tasks.

It could be implementing new features, animations, and just general bug fixing.

- Overseeing the projects, make sure we're on budget, on time, managing all of the people, and trying to get new business as well.

- The project I'm working on is a language learning app for kids.

Right now we have English and Chinese, but they do want to expand it to different languages.

- The main point of the app is they're developing a vocabulary, discerning between different shapes, different colors, different materials.

- We are building that with Unity and C#, so it could be working on a variety of different projects and code bases.

- One thing we have to consider is being able to stretch our assets and stretch the game screen fit to all different sizes of phones.

Having a game that only accommodates the one phone greatly limits your accessibility to as many people who can play it.

(upbeat music) - We work with the university to find our interns, and we tell them a little bit about what we're doing, and then the students can click on a link and see if it's something they might be interested in.

- This internship is partnered with the Pack STEM Program.

We have a maximum of 120 hours to fill within the span of one semester based on my school schedule.

- LionDragon is a really inviting studio.

They're very willing to teach you and be very accommodating to your needs and your potential.

- It's a great place to work.

We're definitely going to help you improve your skills and kind of get you as a stepping stone to maybe that next career that you might want.

- I'm really appreciative that I had my internship at LionDragon as my first internship experience, because now I know that I could apply all that stuff to bigger companies like Google and Facebook.

- They say that one of the best to learn something like this is to just be given things to do and just to do it.

- At the beginning of my internship, it was just ground up.

We had to build all of the architecture and all of the tools to actually get this game to work.

We're now at the stage where we're getting on the bugs fixed to get to a stage where you can actually play it on your phone.

- We have some experienced engineers on the teams who can definitely guide them.

They can rely on them to clean a lot more information that they wouldn't get from a textbook.

- I feel like I've learned so much just from this internship, being given things to do and being able to complete them and learning new things in the process of how small startups operate, how to contribute to a large code base, and how to navigate a code base.

- This internship has really helped me learn a lot of best practices for what the software engineering fields would require.

Actually get to see what you're doing wrong, where you can expand your thinking.

(upbeat music) - I always like being stretched into new experiences because it helps develop my character.

- The thing I love most about programming is that I could just type words on a computer and then out comes a very polished game that you can actually play on your phone.

- It's kind of changed my perspective on how I view different games.

When I see them or when I play them, I'm like, "Oh, wow.

I wonder how they did this or how did they do that."

So I get to shape the experience instead of just enjoying it, and I think that's the coolest part about this project.

- I think just knowing that I could do the job that I have now and actually create games that people can play immediately.

It's really nice that I get to actually work on a game with the tools that I know.

- In a game like this, everything is very visual, like there's a lot of like animations and sound effects.

What I like about it is that I can visually see something that I've created.

- It's really rewarding just knowing that the little feature that I implemented or that the cool graphics that I put in get to be appreciated by someone.

(upbeat music) - Math and computer science generally go hand in hand, so there's quite a bit of math that you need.

The main thing that math brings into computer science is logic.

Logic is very important when you're coding different structures.

- We have a variety of different tasks for interns, most of which do require code.

It could be writing new scripts or amending existing code, making little tweaks to the actual interface of the game.

- Software engineering in particular is one of the most communication-heavy fields out there.

We all collaborate on the same project.

That really helps us with our workflow.

- It's very collaborative here.

We (indistinct) the projects, everyone has a responsibility, and sometimes they're not sure how to solve a particular problem, so they have to come into office and talk it out.

So it's important to have the soft skills of working with other people.

- A good thing about having a team like this, you can have a conversation about things or problems and also, if you're stuck, you can ask them for some inspiration and vice versa.

- Without good teamwork and without explaining every step of what you're doing, things and your project can break down pretty quickly.

(upbeat music) - [Shane] I think what's most important is to do what you're passionate about.

See what really excites you, what motivates you, what gets your heart going, and pursue that.

- Computer science is such an expansive field, and so you kind of have like a pick of what you want to go into, like cybersecurity or machine learning, and game development.

- From game development, you learn a lot of programming, a lot of coding, and that's definitely applied to all of the other fields in software engineering, like prompt engineering or data science.

Just having the knowledge of programming and coding can expand your fields into a lot of other stuff.

- There's a lot of resources online to learn things like Unity and other languages.

I use a lot of that at the beginning to really get familiar with the engine.

If you're genuinely interested in something, that you should just try it, just to see if you like it.

- If you're passionate and have an interest in programming or engineering or art, we'd love to have you join us.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues)