So, closed beta testing began this week of my game I’ve been working on for 4 years and I was flooded with countless bugs. Those annoying ones that never showed themselves in development and come from nowhere.
I started getting pretty depressed, plodding away trying to fix these issues, wondering if the reason is that I’m self taught and I’m probably lacking in all the fundamentals & best practices of coding.
Anyway, this video cheered me up. Making me realise that I’m not alone. And I was looking forward to this game too. How does a AAA game get released in such a state?
We’re going to need consistent definitions for “indie” and “AAA” at some point because I looked the company up and while they’re not a large company they’re not a small one either with forty employees. They’re owned by Microsoft too.
You save for a lifetime to open your gourmet trattoria, eager to share with the world your passion for perfection in the art of cooking and dining. You get all the details absolutely perfect.
McDonalds opens up next door and puts you out of business.
People have shit taste. Do your best and just publish. What else can you do? If the game is fun and finds an audience, bugs won’t matter. Kingdom Come Deliverance released in a literal unplayable state. Still people eat it up.
You can try that with a game that has enough hype behind it (like no man’s sky), if you try that stunt with a run of the mill indie game that has no hype and doesn’t stand out visually, you’ll get crushed and sink like a rock.
This is about acceptance of one’s work, not marketing strategy.
When I say, just publish, I don’t mean that literally, as if the developer should just send the build to steam and forget about it.
I mean, you have to quit at some point. If you focus on making the game perfect, you’ll never stop working on it. You can’t avoid all bugs and you can always find something more to polish. At some point, you have to recognize when you’ve got something that is “good enough,” and allow yourself to be pleased with it.
I looked up some images of gourmet trattoria restaurants and while some of them were definitely fancy some of them weren’t that much better than a good mall restaurant. I definitely could see them sharing some of their customers.
This. Where I live we only have one good restaurant (it just happens to be Italian). Just about everyone in the area eats there at some point regardless of their normal eating habits. If for nothing else for the fantastic pizza they make.
I’m not sure what Anders point really was. Perhaps they were misunderstanding my point.
Let me clarify without the analogy :
The majority of people have such blunted senses that they cannot discern a difference between quality and crap. So the intelligent developer, who does happen to prefer quality, must still develop games that they themselves enjoy and respect, but keeping an ear to the ground will help them keep perspective and realize that much of their careful attention to detail will be lost on gamers anyway. So long as gamers attention span isn’t being strung out, or they are made to feel like an idiot, they aren’t going to drop a fun game because of petty bugs.
So, again, developer does their best with the time they have, and prioritizes squashing the show-stoppers. The bugs that halt progress, interrupt gameplay significantly, force player to restart, so on. Bugs that make gamer record and upload to youtube to laugh about are not showstoppers. Heck, maybe they are a great form of marketing. Maybe leave the physics bugs in!
The analogy just halted a bit, the gourmets that eat at a expensive restaurant would not see McD as an altenative, maybe a fancy hipster burger joint with 6 week hanged prime rib instead of the excuse of a meat they use at McD.
This is how 6 week hanged prime rib looks like, it’s a godsend
