Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
faster. Make sure the performance issues are completely taken care of before code
complete and monitor those issues closely until the project ships.
Lord British Must Die
It
into a game. On
UltimaVII, the team installed a special way to kill Lord British, especially since
Richard Garriott wanted Lord British to be completely invincible. You need a
little background first.
'
s a common practice to put inside jokes or
“
Easter Eggs
”
Origin was in an office building in the west Austin hill country, and the
building had those glass front doors secured with powerful magnets at the
top of the door. One day, Richard and some other folks were headed out to
lunch, and when Richard opened the door, the large block of metal that
formed a part of the magnetic lock somehow became detached from the
glass and fell right on Richard
s head. Lord British must truly be unkillable,
because that metal block weighed something like 10 pounds and had sharp edges
'
…
.
The team decided to use that event as an inside way to kill the monarch of Britannia. At noon, the Lord
British character
s schedule took him into the courtyard of the castle. He would pause briefly under the
doorway, right under a brass plaque that read,
'
“
Lord British
'
s Throne Room.
”
If you double-clicked the
sign, it would fall on his head and kill him straightaway.
Perhaps the weirdest thing about this story is that a few weeks later, the same metal block on the same
door fell on Richard a second time, again with no permanent damage. The guy is truly protected by
some supernatural force, but he did buy a hard-shell construction helmet, and he wasn
'
t so speedy to
be the first person to open the door anymore.
By the time the team is working solidly to zero bugs, all the code and content is
installed, and there is nothing to do but fix bugs. It
'
s a good idea to add a few steps
to the bug-fixing protocol. Here
'
s the usual way bugs get assigned and fixed:
1. A bug is written up in test and assigned to a team member to fix.
2. The bug is fixed and is sent back to test for verification.
3. The bug is closed when someone in test gets a new version and observes the
game behaving properly.
Close to the zero bug date, a bit of sanity checking is in order. This sanity checking
puts some safety valves on the scope of any changes. By this time in the project, it
usually takes two overworked human brains to equal the thinking power of one nor-
mal brain.
1. A bug is written up in test and reviewed by the team lead.
2. If needed, it is saved for a triage team, usually the team leads, to discuss whether
it should be fixed and who should fix it.
