[TRENCHES] Thursday, April 2, 2015 - Under Appreciated
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Under Appreciated
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/under-appreciated
The More Things Change…
AnonymousMy father has a story he likes to tell of when he did testing for a game company. This was before videogames were mainstream, so he was doing test runs of an old school RPG. I won’t give away too much about what game, but it has a lot to do with running and shadows. He had been game mastering a campaign with the system, and one of his supervisors came in to check on him. So, my dad starts talking about the campaign, particularly an NPC called the Paladin. The Paladin was an actor that wore a suit of “armor” that was actually a bunch of recording devices. The devices existed already in the game, but the supervisor said they wouldn’t fit into the suit. My dad continued the campaign, and finished his testing.
A year or so later, he sees a module for the game that uses the Paladin, relabeled as Knight, as well as several other ideas he had. He was not credited anywhere, and had done the testing for free. That night, my dad sat down with his game buddies and decided that if his ideas were good enough to be published, he would publish them in his own system.
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Also, Fez is three years old! You could have a less dated reference by trashing Sony Smash Bros!
From my experience dealing with Filipinos, chances are good that their English was "impeccable" because they considered very carefully what they were going to say before they said it. That doesn't mean that they actually understood what you said. Filipinos are very self conscious about speaking English, in school they are made fun of by other classmates, and even the teacher if they mispronounce an English word, so they won't speak English unless they are confident that they will say it right. But that does not mean that they actually understand English as well as they sound like they speak it. If they don't understand they will just pretend like they did, until and after the misunderstanding was detected. That's one of the things that broke off the relationship with my ex-fiancee. She would always pretend that she understood and agreed with what I said, until I found out that where I thought that the relationship was going wasn't at all the same place that she thought that it was going. Such is life.
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!).
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