Lockdown is the least fun part of the process for me. There are some bugs I mention to the programming team and they fix before I get back to my desk. And there are others that take a lot more work. There are issues that a crash dump will tell you where the failure is, and there are some where the dump only shows you what happened afterwards. Like finding a body in a room with a knife in its back. You can see that the body is dead, see that the knife killed it (probably) but there is no evidence of who was using the knife.
So we look for patterns. Who else was in the room when the murder happened? Professor Multi-thread AI was going through, he says to innocently value the assets on the armoire, but he's always doing his own thing. Ms Garbage Collection always finds the body, and nobody ever trusts the maid. Colonel Tactical Combat ... well lets just say that he own's a lot of knives.
The luxury we have as programmers is we can bring the victim back to life and send that back into the room.
"Okay Mr Game, go back in."
"But.... what if I die again?"
"That's what we are hoping for." *push*
Sometimes the weapon changes. We locked up all the knives and now it's death by plunger.
Sometimes we try to lock our suspects out of the room and they keep busting in. In the worst cases we think we lock everyone out and in the morning Mr Game is still dead.
Lockdown will drive you a little crazy. We read and reread code. We run tests, go through debug and scour data for clues. Our goal is unattainable (the game without bugs), But we want to get as close as possible. And we don't check in significant changes.
Even the minor changes get reviewed. I feel bad telling experienced, talented developers that they can't checkin a change unless they have someone else go through it and validate it (well not really bad, but sorta bad). But the biggest risk at this stage is that we will introduce new issues. That it will get into a public version and skip all the time we spent validating that the game was stable. It's tough to keep your hands out of the cookie jar.
I do have to say that our QA guys do a great job. They don't often get as much time as we would like to test our builds. But if we do give them notice and time to provide feedback on the game they do a great job. And we are very appreciative of the community for posting reports and crashes (some post every day with each new build). It's great feedback. You make our lives easier and improving the experience for everyone else who will play.
But it is fun having a chance to just play the game in a consistent form. Tonight we all sat around and laughed at Codecritter as he accepted a quest to escort a noblemans daughter, then accidently lead her into a battle to free a village on another quest and killed off her an his sovereign. Gaming is the most fun when the rest of the office is taunting you for your inablility to play (someday get Toby to ask you how he spent months trapped in a basement of another game).
One of the things I enjoy most about the recent builds, and unfortunately doesn't get much attention in the change logs is the amazing work that the team is creating. The following spell painting in particular are my favorites:
I think everyone will enjoy 1.1. We are certainly excited to share it with you.
