[TRENCHES] Tuesday, May 14, 2013 - Visage

Geth

Visage
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/visage

Guaranteed Fail?

Anonymous

I was working on a short contract for a children-focused game that was coming out on most major consoles. One of the juggling acts the company has to… juggle when making a game across multiple platforms to make sure they finish at roughly the same time so they go on sale simultaneously. One thing preventing this are the hardware manufacturers who each have their own unique set of rules and regulations all games must adhere to before they will be approved: the dreaded TCRs.

Nintendo is historically a harsh master, with a reputation for having a very high standard before they’ll approve your game (remember the ‘Nintendo Seal of Quality’?). I was told at the time that Nintendo will always fail your first submission no matter how much care you take in respecting their TCRs; they’ll find something you missed, or find some other bugs and just fail you on those regardless of how bad they are.

So it made sense for us to prepare the Wii build a little earlier than the others, to test for and fix only the most glaring issues, and send that build in so we could get that first doomed submission over with and have some guaranteed time to fix everything else in the Wii version for the second submission roughly a month later.

Nintendo passed the game on first submission.

It was decided to not submit a second time.

RMS Oceanic

I hate when something becomes so reliable you can build a schedule around it, only for it to then buck the trend.

CroakerBC

Microsoft's X-Box certification process is famously brutal/whimsical, as well.

I shudder to think what Nintendo's is like, assuming it's actually more strenuous to get through cert for them than it is for MS.

Ori Klein

I'm going to make a guesstimate that the Wii was so short on titles and Nintendo wanted to market it so badly, they internally lowered their quality standards just to make games go through and be out and available ASAP.

Dark Raven X

Is that "Cora" a reference to the feminist whore thing from Dead Island?

Darkewolfe

I think part of the Nintendo story seems to be that they submitted something that wasn't really what they considered finished as part of sandbagging. When it was passed, they just sent it to print,.

Cobell

Darkewolfe wrote: »

I think part of the Nintendo story seems to be that they submitted something that wasn't really what they considered finished as part of sandbagging. When it was passed, they just sent it to print,.

It costs money to send a build through submission, so it was likely a monetary consideration.

Also, they're really not joking about the Nintendo submission thing. They really are historically brutal: I've been in a project where they've failed a submission for something and requested a fix and then failed the next submission for having that fix and demanding it be returned to the previous behavior.

klemming

Cobell wrote: »

Darkewolfe wrote: »

I think part of the Nintendo story seems to be that they submitted something that wasn't really what they considered finished as part of sandbagging. When it was passed, they just sent it to print,.

It costs money to send a build through submission, so it was likely a monetary consideration.

Also, they're really not joking about the Nintendo submission thing. They really are historically brutal: I've been in a project where they've failed a submission for something and requested a fix and then failed the next submission for having that fix and demanding it be returned to the previous behavior.

And as brutal as they are/were, they still let the occasional screw-up through.
Was it Micro Machines for the NES that crashed if you tried to go in reverse the moment it started?

Cobell

klemming wrote: »

Cobell wrote: »

Darkewolfe wrote: »

I think part of the Nintendo story seems to be that they submitted something that wasn't really what they considered finished as part of sandbagging. When it was passed, they just sent it to print,.

It costs money to send a build through submission, so it was likely a monetary consideration.

Also, they're really not joking about the Nintendo submission thing. They really are historically brutal: I've been in a project where they've failed a submission for something and requested a fix and then failed the next submission for having that fix and demanding it be returned to the previous behavior.

And as brutal as they are/were, they still let the occasional screw-up through.
Was it Micro Machines for the NES that crashed if you tried to go in reverse the moment it started?

It's not that they're super thorough, they can just be extremely picky about very specific things, and those things aren't necessarily always the same between submissions. And it's kind of impossible to tell when they will be like that.

SwashbucklerXX

Dark Raven X wrote: »

Is that "Cora" a reference to the feminist whore thing from Dead Island?

No, it is a reference to the fact that the speaking character is named Cora.

Toefoo

I guess I have just been lucky with Nintendo; Microsoft was always worse for us. There were times where one Lotcheck issue was enough to fail us, but instead of kicking it back NOA would just shoot us an e-mail and ask for a quick revision to save us the trouble of a second submission.

Alcaste

SwashbucklerXX wrote: »

Dark Raven X wrote: »

Is that "Cora" a reference to the feminist whore thing from Dead Island?

No, it is a reference to the fact that the speaking character is named Cora.

They're talking about the 'I'm sure that'll change' bit, where they'll probably leave the name of the body type in the game. Or at least somewhere in the code.


It's interesting how brutal Nintendo is considering all the shovelware we saw on the Wii. I guess they really, REALLY wanted to get that thing out there.

sorwah

In my experience, Sony is just as egregious for their TRCs. I remember quite a few times they'd flag us for the same exact bug in the same exact scenario, only their triage group marked it an A severity and the more detailed group marked it a C severity. We also had one time Sony failed us simply because in our bowling game, "There aren't enough color options for the bowling ball.". All their guidelines were followed.

However, all three basically have a catch-all guideline that summarizes in their own words, "If we see something we don't like, we're flagging it under this guideline.".

As for the story, I can relate. I was testing a Wii title that for all intents and purposes was a family-styled mini-game. We sent in the first NoA build and being the lead cert tester I tried being very thorough. The US SKU went in first, came back with a Pass 1 week before the projected project deadline. The developers response, "We passed? How in the...". So needless to say the foreign SKUs actually had less defects being that they failed their cert pass due to a 50 hz PAL issue (DAMN YOU PAL!!!!) and ended up completing a week after the deadline.

CroakerBC

Toefoo wrote: »

I guess I have just been lucky with Nintendo; Microsoft was always worse for us. There were times where one Lotcheck issue was enough to fail us, but instead of kicking it back NOA would just shoot us an e-mail and ask for a quick revision to save us the trouble of a second submission.

I think my personal favourite was having the MS cert team switch between builds - the new guys went back and failed the new build on something that hadn't changed from the previous drop.
Cue wailing, gnashing of teeth.

ETA: I totally get where the story is coming from; if you're pushing out an RC, you have to be at least moderately confident it does what it should and won't, say, cause boxes to explode, covering users in shards of molten plastic. So if something passes cert the first time round, you're hardly going to question it - that's a few weeks of billable time you just got back.

Unless you deliberately handed the cert team a bag of crap, and they somehow passed it - then both you and (eventually) they are going to be in trouble.

Sargonas

Cobell wrote: »

Also, they're really not joking about the Nintendo submission thing. They really are historically brutal: I've been in a project where they've failed a submission for something and requested a fix and then failed the next submission for having that fix and demanding it be returned to the previous behavior.

Yup I've seen the SAME thing happen to my guys as well before!

I spent about 3 years as a Project Manager for Cert/Compliance at [Redacted] (lets just say it's a HUGE publisher), the team that guides games through the whole TCR process. Nintendo was no joke. They would arbitrarily fail you for *anything* they could think of. They had multiple cert teams who were forbidden to speak to each other about a given game and compare notes, so that when you resubmitted it would go to a new team who had no part in the first sub and they might decide to fail you on something the other team already deemed ok. You could have 3 submissions, and have two teams green light a specific TCR and then on the third sub they would fail it...

To put it in better perspective, in 2011 before I switched to a completely different role, [Redacted] had the HIGHEST pass rate percentage of any major publisher with Nintendo.... at 41%. 41% of our games had a first pass, and we were the best in the industry. Most studios average 75%-90% on MS/Sony to help further put that in perspective. Nintendo is a tough company to deal with involving TCRs and the thing is, 75% of the time your failures are not at all related to their documentation, it's just some arbitrary thing they make up with on the fly and put against you. For what it's worth Sony and MS can be tricky, but they will have a solid dialogue with you and actually work with you to help adjust your score and give you tons of waivers, so you can talk your way out of any real nonsense and just focus on the true issues.

Moral of the story? Doesn't matter how rough your game is. If you pass on the first sub, you shut up and roll with it, polish be damned!

I should also point out the cost to resubmit to Nintendo is *significantly* higher than either Sony or MS as well... go figure.

Demonicoreo

I love Trenches for unabashedly making very human jack asses. That said, Cora seems to be as self serving as Q though she seems more willing to take the group with her on the steps up the ladder as long as it helps her climb higher. Oh games industry... at one point in life I wanted to be part of you and now I am glad my family stopped me.