walk into a meeting and do it with—I’m not going to name names, but they’re literally standing over you, staking their reputations on the idea that this bug absolutely cannot happen, that it is literally technologically impossible.”
“So I guess you’re not in play test anymore.”
“Not for this one, no. I guess that’s the grand prize.”
There was nothing going on the rest of the day except other designers speculating about what more Darren had planned. I found a database showing records of bugs from previous projects, all closed and confirmed before shipping, but the records were there. I sorted for the ones that weren’t active, strictly speaking, but neither had they been fixed. The DNFs.
I searched around a little in the No Repro pile. It turned out there was no one bug exactly like the one I’d seen, but a few that might have been similar: “King Aerion dead when should be unkillable, WTF”; “Level three, dragon already dead when I arrived”; “Goblin children massacred? Why???” None of them repeated, and they could have been part of the same underlying bug or three entirely separate bugs.
They could have been minor coincidences. I knew by now that a simulation-heavy game was unpredictable. A monster could wander too close to a torch and catch on fire; then it would go into its panic-run mode and anything else it bumped into might catch. Or a harmless goblin might nudge a rock, which then rolls and hits another creature just hard enough to inflict one hit point of damage, which then triggers a combat reaction, and next thing you know there’s an unscheduled goblin riot. The blessing and curse of simulation-driven engines was that although you could design the system, the world ran by itself, and accidents happened.
They usually didn’t, because the game didn’t bother to simulate anything too far from the player in any detail—it would slow everything down too far. But maybe the game was having trouble deciding what not to simulate. Each one was marked No Repro, so maybe it just never happened again.
I noticed that most of these bugs belonged to the same person, LMcknhpt. I sent Lisa a quick e-mail with the subject line “RoGVI bugs 2917, 40389, 51112.”
Got something similar. Did this ever get figured out? Just curious.
Yours sincerely, &c.
Russell
Assistant Game Designer
Realms of Gold Team
The reply came a few minutes later.
Re: RoGVI bugs 2917, 40389, 51112
Nope. Couldn’t repro any of these, sent back to Matt. Probably in data.
Lisa
That “probably in data” was an ever-so-slightly dickish sign-off. What she meant to say was that the code was working fine, so it must be the designer who screwed up—he just forgot to flag the king as unkillable, or he put a rock in the wrong place, or routed a goblin’s patrol path through a lit torch.
I wrote back, “I triple-checked the data. Want to see?” but she didn’t respond at all, except that five minutes later, the bug database had sent me three separate automated messages.
RoGVI bug 2917 has been reassigned to you by LMcknhpt
RoGVI bug 40389 has been reassigned to you by LMcknhpt
RoGVI bug 51112 has been reassigned to you by LMcknhpt
Where was the bug? How did I even start thinking about fixing something like this? A bug could be in either of two elements of the game, data or code, or it could be in both.
Something horrible was lurking in memory or code or whatever forsaken in-between region of space it lived in, and it was messing with our game. But bugs don’t happen without somebody making them, by stupidity or negligence. All I had to do was trace it back to where it lived. The first step, as everyone knew, was to find the version where it first occurred—the crucial change, an added feature or an attempt to fix some other problem, which had been copied from version to version ever since. So far I hadn’t even found a version where it didn’t occur, but there must be one. I’d just have to go back far enough.
Chapter Eight
I slept late the next morning, sat for a half hour over cereal and coffee before wandering over to work, shirt untucked, past midday traffic, people with regular jobs already heading to lunch. No one minded. I lost myself in reading through old computer game manuals, role-playing game modules, design documents, even the italicized flavor text on game cards (CORRELLEAN REMNANT (5/4) / Submarine movement / The regiment fought on as the waters rose; they never stopped).