Trenches comic: Thursday February 23, 2012 - Justice

Bogey

Drive Fast and Crash a Lot

02/23/2012 - Anonymous

My first testing job was for a game where you drive really fast and crash your car a lot by that publisher people hated for a long time but don’t anymore. They make a lot of sport games.

Anyway, I sat down at my Xbox to do gameplay testing on the title - it was set to be released in a couple of weeks and was supposedly finished after having been tested to death already. In, no joke, TEN MINUTES I found a 100% reproducible crash that affected roughly a third of all the levels. I reported it and almost immediately a crowd of seniors, skeptical at the abilites of the new boy, gathered. I was able to repro the bug on multiple discs across multiple consoles, making it an immediate show-stopper. A lot of the testers who tested it previously got ripped a new one for missing such a huge bug, and I got a pat on the back and all the best projects from that day forward.

But that’s not actually the story. The best part is how they handled it. Instead of fixing the bug, they ended up removing all the affected levels. Yes. That’s a third of the entire game.

I’m sorry everyone.

RMS Oceanic

EXTREME CLOSE UP

And I've kinda been in a similar situation in the story about catching a job-ending bug.

Gaslight

I still want a model rocket robot horse.

Munkus Beaver

best story yet

Karl

That story is fucking amazing.

Dark Raven X

How did I never notice Justice looks like Serenity?

And maybe they became DLC. ;D

Henroid

Munkus Beaver wrote:

best story yet

This. :^:

Unknown

This content has been removed.

MichaelLC

Aegeri wrote:

That story is awesome. I wonder if the game he is talking about is Burnout?

Yeah, that's likely it.

Aegeri wrote:

I also wonder what the specific crash is. So many intriging questions, so little answers.

If it happened in a lot of levels, probably a light-post or another car.

Mutak

by that publisher people hated for a long time but don’t anymore

I don't know about anyone else, but i still pretty much despise EA.

Milknut

Yeah, I never stopped voodoo-dolling EA.

Zazu Yen

And then they release the fixed levels as downloadable content for an extra fee, which will probably cover the cost of the extra work and then some.

Framling

Yeah, welcome to the wonderful world of code churn. You can have a dev work out a fix for that bug, but there's no way of knowing what other problems will be introduced.

When time is short, amputate.

Neuroskeptic

Ahem, forgetting something aren't we? 12 posts in this thread and no-one's mentioned the noses.

Seriously though, great story. I guess the dev's could then fix the bug and release the levels as a DLC...

endofanera

Perhaps I'm alone, but I don't get it. What's up with this comic? I mean, I get how it ties into the story, but what are we looking at, exactly? Is there a funny I'm not getting?

Roger Wilco

Mutak wrote:

by that publisher people hated for a long time but don’t anymore

I don't know about anyone else, but i still pretty much despise EA.

EA is still a big corporation who only desires money, but they've fixed enough of their issues that most people moved on to hating on Activision.

marsilies

endofanera wrote:

Perhaps I'm alone, but I don't get it. What's up with this comic? I mean, I get how it ties into the story, but what are we looking at, exactly? Is there a funny I'm not getting?

It's an enlargement of a frame from the Season 1 comic "History":
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/history

admanb

marsilies wrote: »

endofanera wrote:

Perhaps I'm alone, but I don't get it. What's up with this comic? I mean, I get how it ties into the story, but what are we looking at, exactly? Is there a funny I'm not getting?

It's an enlargement of a frame from the Season 1 comic "History":
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/history

More specifically it's the original size of that frame. :P

endofanera

Excellent, thank you both.