I quite liked the transition from the game to the game's development, very creative merging of two stories into one.

I must admit to having been curious about what goes into game development and bug fixing for some time now. What you describe here and my (extraordinarily amateurish) knowledge of coding makes the process sound incredibly complicated. I can't imagine having to comb through game code like what you're describing here; it would be far too much for me (I enjoy coding, but I am horrifically bad at it)!

Thanks for the fav.

I generally would describe it as more tedious rather than complicated myself. Not to say there aren't complicated parts especially when trying to figure out solutions. But I mainly went over the bug discovery and investigation process which a lot of times just involves a lot of methodical testing and investigation.

Actually coming up with a fix after figuring out the issue is a whole different beast where you need to make sure you aren't just fixing the issue at hand but also not creating new ones which is the common problem. There's also a lot of taking time into account. Like sometimes a proper fix might take days of rewriting the entire system but that would probably be quite risky and introduce new issues as well as just take a lot of time. So then it becomes what can get hacked in or what half fixes are acceptable to ship with. So there's a lot of coming up with multiple solutions and then talking with people about what the right one is (especially for getting sign of on half fixes).

Fixing the issue at hand but creating new ones - sounds about like what happens when I try to code something.

Out of curiosity: are you allowed to leave in fun bugs that do not directly affect the game itself (ie: the old GTA IV swing set rocket jump) or is the goal to iron out all kinks regardless of impact?

Very rarely. "It's not a bug, it's a feature" is an argument that comes up every so often. Mostly with very minor non-game breaking things that are funny and there's quite a bit of push and pull to let those in. Sometimes they might actually be so amusing and funny on their own that I have seen them spawn their own features before. So the bug becomes actually fixing what is broken about it rather than the overall behavior. This is for things that are clearly bugs.

A case that happens more often is that bugs are written directly to the design documents and sometimes while nothing is directly broken it works slightly differently than the design is written. Sometimes the designer will just agree that the behavior is better than what they initially came up with and so we'd keep it.

Hehehe, bugs sometimes ruin a great game. Thanks for the new story.

They do. A buggy mess of a game is no fun for anyone.

*laughs... I'll be doing something these days, and constantly tell myself things like, 'Now that was stupid, wasn't it?'

Vix

It's a constant in life.

Thanks for reading. I figured I'd give people a more honest window into some of the behind the scene's of my job. It definitely does not meet the nice highly produced behind the scenes videos that most companies put out.

An enjoyable look behind the curtain. The part about alcohol in the workplace was interesting. It was hardly surprising to hear about, even given my overall limited knowledge of game developement. But I'm someone who would rapidly lose the capacity to care about my work if inebriated at the office, so its still a little incomprehensible to me.

Thanks for the fav.

It’s a balancing act. You actually get drunk and there’s no hope of getting anything done. A slight buzz does often help you cease to care that you are writing bad hacking code on a deadline or can get you to more easily get in the flow and not overthink things. Personally, I mostly drink for flavor rather to actually get inebriated so I rarely even hit that buzzed state. It definitely did happen though. Especially, when you are checking in at the end of the day and you actually have nothing to do but wait for the automated tests to give you the go ahead that you could go home.

Well that was an interesting and fun insight into the game production process! Is there really such a alcohol culture?

I would say this is kind of how it was from the time I started working in 2012 till about the time the covid lockdowns started and everyone started working from home. A lot of the stories I've heard from the 2000s indicate that it was even worse and more of a party and drinking culture then. And then you hear stories of the developers from the 80s-90s and they'd be having parties loaded with cocaine.

The lockdowns really showed who was an alcoholic because a lot of people just started day drinking all day because there wasn't anyone giving them the stink eye. Like you'd be judged if you started drinking before 5 (unless it was going out to a team lunch and some people got pretty wrecked on those), but with no one to judge some people just started to overly indulge.

For people still going into the office, I have heard that the lawsuits against Blizzard ended up frightening a lot of companies and they have been trying to put a stop to it. Like it used to be that we got free beer given to us every other Friday for a team happy hour at 5, but most of our booze was stuff we brought ourselves. Some other companies had stuff like built in beer taps in the kitchens where you could always go to just have a pint whenever you wanted. I have heard a lot of that stuff is being taken away and removed. I'm in permanent working from home so I can't confirm that, but that's just what I've heard from others.

Wow, I never expected that at all, that's rather surprising and I guess explains a lot if there was problematic behaviour from some employees in the industry.