Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
different for programmers than artists, because art bugs can be fixed faster and easier.
Programmers tend to fix somewhere between three and ten bugs per day per person,
but your mileage may vary. The point is, measure how fast your bugs are dropping to
zero and draw the line out to see when you
'
ll actually reach zero. If the date looks
grim or doesn
ve got a serious problem on your
hands. If things are looking good, loosen the screws a little and make your game bet-
ter while you can.
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t even slope toward zero, you
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Getting to Zero Bugs on
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II
StarWars:TheForceUnleashedII should have been a nightmare project. It had
an incredibly short production schedule and an aggressive scope, and we
feared the worst. But in the same way that a downhill skier brings his
”
game to any double black diamond slope, everyone on the project did the
same. By the time we hit Beta, the bug count was well under control, the
team wasn
“
A
t too exhausted, and the game was behaving well on all levels.
This set us up to be super aggressive with our bug fixing. Nearly every bug
that came in from QA was fixed, leaving only a few that had to be closed as
“
'
On the day we were due to submit our final version to Nintendo,
we all looked at each other and for once agreed that we were ready to let this
game go with no regrets at all.
Won
'
t Fix.
”
You could just decide to fix fewer bugs, closing them as
“
Won
'
t Fix.
”
While this will
get your active bug count to zero, the live bugs in your game can create an overall
game experience that seems sloppy. If you have no choice but to do this, make sure
you focus on fixing bugs that materially affect the game experience. Minor graphical
glitches you can ignore, but a repeatable crash on the common play path should get
fixed no matter what.
At the end of every game project, the programmers, game designers, and audio engi-
neers are the ones who are hammered the most. Artists and animators are hit espe-
cially hard during the content complete milestone, but after that their work levels off,
mostly because it is usually more predictable. If you don
t believe me, just ask an art-
ist how long it will take him to tweak the lighting on a model. Or ask a level designer
how long it will take to place a few more power-ups in a level, and she will not only
give you a solid answer, but she will also be right about it. Audio engineers also have
very predictable work, but they tend to get pushed about by way too many late
changes by the rest of the team. Every time an animation gets tweaked, the audio
will typically get tweaked to match.
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