[TRENCHES] Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - The Opening
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
The Opening
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/the-opening
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AnonymousOne year out of university and still unemployed, I managed to land a temp contract through an agency for games testing. I was well aware of what “playing games all day” really meant but even so…
First issue was the other recruits. The hiring agency had taken the approach of accepting anyone who’d wandered off the street during the week before the project’s start date and figuratively throwing them against the wall to see who stuck. Some were fresh-faced school-leavers like me, some had never used computers before, some were here in order to satisfy demands from their local job center in exchange for their benefits continuing. There was a local drug dealer who had people pay him in iPhones if they didn’t have cash, there were the two girls who took frequent smoke breaks to go snort cocaine in the toilets, the guy who just played online Flash games without even trying to hide the pew-pew-pew sound effects from the supervisors.
It was a browser-based social game and I made it through the first week of debugging webpages & documentation for it and then came working on the actual game. We were tasked with writing test scripts that we’d then swap with other testers who would follow our scripts step-by-step to see if some aspect or task was working as it should. There was one problem: we weren’t allowed access to the game. Three times I tried pointing out the issue with that with the supervisor but he seemed genuinely befuddled as to what problems there could be. So I went to work writing a test script for selecting an inventory item in a game I’d never seen. As a gamer I at least had some past examples to guide me. Step one I guess would be pressing a button ingame that takes you to a character menu? Then I assumed there’d be separate menus for each character option and one of those would be labelled ‘Items’ like in an RPG. Were weapons a separate item from healing potions? Did this game even have equippable weapons? Could you go to this hypothetical menu during battle? This game has battles with other players, right? Or are we just tending our own instances and then swapping loot online at the end?
Anyway, two weeks after paying us to write gibberish it came to testing and they realised their mistake. Next day we were given logins for the game. It was worse than the imagined one I’d been writing test scripts for.
Posts
What has Issac frozen in his shoes for? What am I missing here? Is he afraid the project will dismantle because other people know about it?
That was 8 strips ago, like 100 years in internet time. You expect everyone to remember shit that happened 100 years ago? do you? 50 years maybe, 99 perhaps, but 100? Hell no
Truth be entirely told, I had since waaaay forgotten about that whole thing, thank you for bringing it back to my attention while also being a bit of a dick about it. I am now informed, that thing i mentioned I was missing is now found.
a ray of sunshine.
I'm guilty of that too, no worries buddy
I've been "Following " the story for the most part, enjoying it even, I though find that maybe this new format is trying to shoehorn in a few to many subthreads all at once, as while the writing to Trenches had always been a little off kilter, I'm apparently beginning to forget entire themes here...
"Holy Grail is too far away from me"
"Ugh, hate the art style"
"Isaac's unsympathetic"
The general flow of the dialog is also awkward here. Isaac confuses a distant, distinct voice (unless Marley sounds just like one of these two women) cutting Marley off mid sentence for Marley's? OK... And as RP mentioned, it's not clear that the women are talking about a prior game in the black box series and not the one the regular crew is referring to.