would happen cleanly; there would be slippage and temporary solutions that would be fixed later, or, more often, become permanent. There would be interdependencies, times when art or programming couldn’t move forward because design hadn’t said what it wanted yet; or design couldn’t build its levels properly because art hadn’t produced the models or programmers hadn’t implemented the necessary features. It would be a dizzying creative collaboration that often took the form of a drawn-out, byzantine war of intrigue.
Preproduction started Monday. It was starting to sink in that this would be our lives for the next eighteen months. It was April then; it would be June when we started alpha 1 while my law school friends would be at graduation parties, the start of a lazy summer before moving on to New York or Palo Alto or New Haven, while I stayed behind in this made-up career. It would be June again when we got out of alpha 3, a year of my life gone, and it would be early October of next year when we reached RTM, and getting cold, and my life would be different in ways I couldn’t imagine yet.
Chapter Seven
I took the bug to Matt.
“In Realms VI?” he said. “It’s possible, I guess. But it’s probably already DNF’ed.”
“DNF?”
“Do Not Fix.”
“Why wouldn’t you fix a bug if you knew about it?”
Matt sighed. “Okay. So Realms VI has on the order of a million lines of code. It’s not going to be perfect, but it has to be shipped. At some point the producer and the leads sit down and go through all the existing bugs and prioritize according to various totally subjective criteria. How often it happens. How bad it is—where the top end is, like, ‘Game crashes, hard drive is erased, user catches fire,’ and the low end is, ‘Yeah, the text in that Options menu could be a more eye-catching shade of blue.’ Fixability, i.e., how loudly and effectively are the people tasked with repairing it going to complain.
“So these bugs are assigned priority numbers, but there’s a cutoff, and anything below that point is marked DNF, Do Not Fix, and officially closed. Ship it. So it’s, like, bugs that almost never happen, or are tiny aesthetic problems, or only come up when you have this or that shitty off-brand video card—it’s not our problem. Oh, and bugs that are part of a tricky section of code, so when you fix them you’d probably end up making new and worse bugs.”
“Okay, but what if this bug was pretty weird and noticeable?”
“Well there’s another category of bugs that don’t get fixed, which is the ones that only ever happen once, and those are marked NR, No Repro.”
“Wouldn’t you fix it anyway, just in case?” I asked. Before answering, Matt gestured me to roll my chair a little closer.
“So I came up through playtest, so… here’s how it looks from that perspective. The fate of many, many bugs runs as follows: a playtester spots it once or twice, logs it in the database with a tentative classification—art, programming, design, or unknown. The report includes instructions on how to find the bug and make it happen again, but some bugs don’t happen reliably. Sometimes they come and go for whatever reason—there’s a little mystery there. But it goes to the bug meeting, where the lead for that area assigns it to a team member, who may or may not have caused it. Doesn’t matter.
“So now the team member has to fix the bug, and they’re cranky because it’s a brand-new bug and they haven’t budgeted time for it and they’re going to be late for something else. So first thing they do is run the game and see if it reproduces. If it doesn’t happen on the first or second try, some guys will slap a No Repro on it, kick it back to playtest, and go on to their next bug.”
“Do they think you’re making it up?”
“You have no idea the contempt people hold toward playtest. You see the logic—everyone else’s job is to get the list of active bugs to zero, except us, whose job is add bugs to the list. So people just kick bugs back all the time. And some of them are pretty hard to verify, and you’ve got to figure out that the bug happens only if the game tries to autosave while you’re actively wielding a plus-three glass dagger and there are exactly four lizard men within three hexes. And then