Hello! My name is Sara Louise Rushmer, I am an aspiring 28  year old programmer who graduated from Teesside University's Bsc (hons) Computer Games Programming course with an overall grade of a 2:1 as part of the class of 2022 on July 20th 2022, and have recently returned to Teesside to start and finish a masters program to enhance my knowledge in the areas of gameplay and AI in games while gaining a better understanding of other areas in games programming that I did not touch on in large detail during my undergraduate.

 

As of September 2024 I had taken over as chair of Teesside Games Creation Society where I use my knowledge of game development  to help students who have an interest in games development and who are on games related courses from first - final year students.

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During my second year I had volunteered to be a PASS Leader, a PASS leader was someone who gave 2-3 hours a week to help the new starters in first year with some of their key programming modules. As this was during the pandemic year of online learning myself and the other volunteer ran the sessions through the popular online app Discord.

 

Later in my second year, I would take on the lead programmer position in a large scale group project module known as Journeyman, the team was 17 people that consisted of designers, artists and programmers. As the lead programmer some of my responsibilities included attending lead only project management lectures where all the leads from each team would get time to talk about ideas with all the lectures, updating tasks on a spreadsheet, giving a progress update on the project to the tutor during class time, these translate into time management development skills and communication skills.

 

During my third and final year at Teesside one of my notable projects had to have been my AI for games project that was a small team project where we needed to create a small game in the Unity game engine using 3 out of 4 AI systems given through the assignment brief. In this project my task was to handle the AI pathfinding, this would allow the attacking AI to advance towards the player while the passive AI that the player could hunt down to health would use it to find and retreat into the hiding spots around the map.