The Final Stretch
Final weeks are at hand! I can't believe it's almost done. And what a ride it has been. We are now getting rid of the last few bug and getting the game 100% done. All game modes work now and it feels gooood I tell you!
FlatOut 2 has become our greatest test and it has required some serious stretching. In all honesty this game is by far the best we've done, and mostly because it feels more like a "game" than our previous releases. It has more in-depth career mode (easily 15-20 hours long), superb party mode, and it has enormous replay value.
I've been testing the game last couple of weeks in addition my other duties, and it feels extremely nice to finally play the full game when everything works. During the development the game is often broken and you get only to play only bits and pieces here and there, so having it all done so that you actually can play the full career (finish races, cups, get cars, money and open more events etc) is really rewarding – especially when crashes are a thing of the past ;-)
Last Saturday we had eight players playing the Party Mode (Stunt Arena) on PS2 here at the Bugbear office. Couple of beers kept our throats in prime condition when yelling and cheering each others efforts! Hilarious stuff :-) Now that's a rare sample of testing being a lot of fun. It's not all fun though. The testing tasks includes detailed bug reports, testing, confirming, more testing, more reporting, confirming, regressing i.e. checking bugs that were supposed to be fixed - this goes on and on. I don't envy the guys and gals who do this all the time.
I'm sure there's lot of people out there who are dreaming about being a game tester in the future. Now, I'm not gonna say "don't do it", because I honestly don't have that much experience on that profession. The testing that game developers are doing, differs a bit from the real testers so I can't speak for them, but what I can tell you, is that testing is as serious part of developing the game as any part of it and the people involved don't get the credit as much as they should.
Quality Assurance (QA) is a very important part of development cycle. Everybody expects a console game to be bug free. It must work, because patching it is out of question. Next-gen console games are a bit different story on that issue, because of online patching possibilities, but it still can't be excuse to ship low quality game.
"The Crunch" is almost over here at Bugbear office, summer vacation is near and you see a lot more smiling people on the hallways, which is nice. This might be my last blog concerning FlatOut 2, so I hope you've enjoyed our insights to the developing process as much we've had the pleasure to write about it. FlatOut 2 is gonna be out this soon and all I can say is… GET READY FOR IT! It's gonna rock your world! It rocked mine.
- Tomi Linja-aho
