[TRENCHES] Thursday, April 9, 2015 - Work Out The Kinks

Geth

Work Out The Kinks
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/work-out-the-kinks

Mr Grumpy Dev

Anonymous

I love our QA guys. Hell, the good ones are worth their weight in gold and should be paid twice what they are.

The ability to reduce the factors in a bug so that I can quickly nail the issue is a completely indispensable part of game development, especially at the end where I am walking a tightrope between tears and table flipping rage at all times, with only the balancing pole of caffeine to keep me upright.

But. But. And I say this with love QA folks.

You aren’t designers. I’m sorry, but it’s true. Hell, these days most designers aren’t designers either, so no need to feel bad. Often the only guys who get to make decisions about the games we work on are the far removed owners and their marketing buddies, who can suggest whatever the standout feature of the game they briefly played that weekend before going out on the town (hey, we should have takedowns/melee combat/sassy/robots/fungusFacedZombies!).

Adding your feature request and linking it tenuously to a TCR in an attempt to get your pet idea implemented is a crime so horrific that it should be punished with trousers full of ravenous weasels.

Please understand that when you enter a bug requesting a feature near the end of a project you are pulling off a white dueling glove and striking some developer around the face with it. In these situations, “by design” really does mean “fuck off”.

And pretty please, for all that is holy and by our great and mighty Lord Gaben, fill your repro rates out.

The bug “My Xbox explodes every time I start this mission”

is not the same as

“Once upon a cold and shadowy morn the legends tell of an Xbox which, when the doomed mission was begun, did explode. All the other Xboxen were fine from that day on, and there was much rejoicing”.

Ginormous

Did anyone else have issues figuring out which choice he would want someone to put down? That second option would make me want to gut the person who submitted it.

MichaelLC

Designers are not comedians. Hell, some designers of comedy games are not comedians.

Bursar

Hoho, you laugh at motion controls, but...

Trauma Center: Second Opinion was slated as a launch title for the Wii. It was in development before the console was available, and was actually in development before a real development kit was available. There was only one hardware unit given to the USA company to test on, so QA was run around-the-clock on this poor machine, only pausing when new builds were pushed onto it. With the extreme novelty of motion controls at the time and the punishing difficulty of the game, there was a lot of cursing. We soon became very, very good at Trauma Center, because there was simply no time to be bad at it.