Techmomology
http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/17

Glasshole
http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/14

Delectable
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/delectable

Shock And Awe

Anonymous

I truly and honestly did not know what I was in for when I went from working QA on regular software to doing testing for the video games industry. I knew I’d be taking a hit to my pay: Regular QA work pays like a regular job, and on top of that it mostly has regular hours.

There is no “crunch” period to speak of.

And then I stumbled into a bugtesting job for a developer I won’t name, and to put it bluntly… Conditions were hell. Twelve to sixteen hours a day, most of those hours consisting of unpaid overtime, for the privilege of working sweatshop conditions while my coworkers and I hammered the unrefined bronze of the original source code into a workable tool, bug report by painstaking bug report.

It’s no lie to say that the only reason I didn’t quit on my first day was that I needed the money very badly. Much like a hostage comes to view his or her captors with a degree of respect and companionship, I began to think of the job as a way to keep me grounded, keep my spending in check, and keep me out of trouble.

How could I not focus on paying down my bills when I was too tired from testing to do anything but sleep and bolt down a quick meal before heading back in?

After my contract expired, I was fortunate enough to find a permanent QA position with a software company with reasonable, 40-hour work weeks. However every time I complete a game, to this day, I stand and silently salute the QA staff of every game I finish.

I’ve been where they were. I know just what it’s like to be in the trenches. And by God, if they have the fortitude to stay there, they’re far hardier individuals than I could ever claim to be.

Aftermath
http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/12

Repetition
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/repetition

What? You wanted to get paid??

Anonymous

Years ago my buddy came across a posting on a bulletin board (an actual physical one) at BYU looking for game testers over the summer.

Since this is the dream of many a foolish college student we called the number and basically had a phone interview. We were told it was for a new startup company that had a contract with the big boy game companies to develop some titles. Since both of has less than zero experience testing games, this sounded perfectly reasonable so we readily accepted.

The work was in Salt Lake City so we made the drive up from Provo (about 45 minutes). When we arrived we SHOULD have had warning bells go off because the job site was in a warehouse with no signs of a real business anywhere in sight. There were about a dozen computers off to the side with a large wooden desk nearby where our boss sat.

We had none of the amenities that I’ve since heard other testers talk about: bottomless refrigerators, fun, a paycheck.

You see they told us that we started in the middle of the pay cycle so we wouldn’t get paid right away and it would be about 3 weeks before we got paid. Sucks but hey we were going to be playing video games all day right!? And play we did. We worked on 3 or 4 different titles, none ever seemed quite ready. Some of the stupidest, boring, mind numbingly inane games ever designed. And buggy. But we were in a “crunch” they said, so we worked 80+ hour weeks. Yay! Video games AND overtime!

And then came the day, about three weeks after we started, that we showed up and the doors were locked. When we went around to the side and peeked in the window the warehouse was completely empty. No desks, no crappy computers, no note, and certainly no money.

FAQ Feeds Schedule

Read the full story here

Compulsory
http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/10

Conversions
http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/07

Inadvertent
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/inadvertent

It’s called Rohypnol

Anonymous

Among my circle of friends, I’m known for openly enjoying Japanese visual novels and dating sims. I largely keep it on the DL, but from time to time it comes up.

Enter a friend who co-owns an indie development studio. The whole company consists of two programmers, an audio guy, and an artist. They mostly make flash games, and the one friend calls me in, asking me to do some focus testing on a dating sim they made that was nearing the end of cycle. I figured that it would be a good way to kill a weekend, said yes, and signed an NDA.

At this point I should mention that the stated goal of the project was “to create a dating sim/RPG that brings Western sensibilities to a Japanese genre”. All the girls in the game were 18+, there was no “harem ending,” and tentacle monsters were strictly forbidden. That sort of thing.

The game had an interesting mechanic where the player’s relationship with the various female characters were measured on two axes: How much they liked you and how much they were attracted to you. To get an ending with any single girl you had to have a high score in both these categories, but having a high attraction would still let you “score” mid-game.

There also existed a potion which would raise attraction with one girl but not how much they liked you. Between four people working on this game and who knows how many other volunteer playtesters like myself, nobody had managed to pick up that you can buy said potion that essentially lets you date rape female characters in the game, and you can use it even if they don’t like you.

After arguing about the ethics of the potion for half the weekend with the developers, I washed by hands of the situation. To my knowledge, the game hasn’t seen the light of day.

Marvelous Heroism
http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/05

Dominion
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/dominion

The Biggest Problem

Anonymous

I have this story secondhand, but it’s humorous enough to share regardless.

Back in the iron age of MMOs, there was a designer with a pet project: Guildhalls. These would be fortresses that provided benefits to the guild that controlled them as well as providing an additional PvP element: Rival guilds could “storm the castle” to claim it for their own. This required the permission of the defending guild, since griefers were everywhere.

The team likes the idea, but they don’t have the resources for it. So, this brave designer takes it upon himself to do all that alone. Yes, he pulls multiple all-nighters and nearly drives himself mad designing, coding, and testing an incredibly complex new feature.

Through herculean effort, he succeeds and the guildhalls go live. Our hero pats himself on the back for his accomplishment.

A month later, Guild A starts a riot on the game boards. Guild B has stolen their guildhall while everyone was offline! As the team does damage control on the boards, our hero flips out, convinced he’s going to get fired if he doesn’t find and squash the bug ASAP. He spends hours going through the code line by line, making and discarding multiple theories in the mad search for a bug that would undermine the whole system. How could this happen? He was sure everything was ironclad!

Finally, the case is solved by an e-mail from a member of Guild A:

“There’s no bug. I let Guild B in late last night so that they could take over the guildhall. Please don’t tell my guildmates.” Our hero breathes a sigh of relief. The team has a big laugh over it, then posts to the message boards that the guildhalls are working exactly as intended.

Back in the day, there was a saying about MMOs: “The biggest problems with the game are the ones playing alongside you.”