作者：Russ Pitts

在开始1年多后，《防御阵型2》的开发进入了最后阶段。

现在是2014年5月，《防御阵型2》在Hidden Path的团队负责人们，包括联合制作人Dacey Willoughby，执行制作人Jeff Pobst，首席程序员Steve Messick，设计总监John Daud以及自称为“开发支持人员”的Jon Lee正围坐在厨房和办公室之间的一个房间的桌子旁。在这个房间的角落里摆放着一台Neo Geo街机，在靠着墙的架子上摆放着各种桌面游戏。

这个房间是团队们的娱乐场所。但这一次的会议却不是为了寻乐。

在这次会议前一周，《防御阵型2》发布了测试版本。无数玩家玩了这款游戏。大多数反馈都是正面了。（但Pobst认为太过正面了。他更想看到那些带有偏见的反馈。）但同时也具有一些漏洞报告。

他们鼓励测试玩家在发现问题时能够发送相关报告。Hidden Path已经收集了这些报告，并且拥有了一个列表。而这次会议的目的便是为了给这些报告分类，并制定计划去完善它们。如果这是所有团队唯一需要担心的内容，那么他们的心态定会明朗许多。但事实却不是如此。

Pobst在研究列表时说道：“这存在大量的崩溃元素。”部分列表内容是手写的。这是最近关于测试报告中的“崩溃”问题的计算。大概有200个。

Pobst想知道是否所有的200个崩溃元素都是不同的，而这意味着存在200个不同的内容导致游戏出现崩溃。这是有待解决的内容，但事实上它们也有可能是相同的，并且许多邮件可能是在说着同样的内容。

找到某些人去浏览整个列表并明确引起每次崩溃的原因是很难的。因为每个人都在忙着自己的事。

本周，该团队面临着向发行商505递交游戏架构的目标。这同样也是该团队致力于在2周内面向E3呈现多人游戏演示版本的最后一周。这也是他们必须完成所有游戏内部文本并将其发送给本土化团队将其从英文翻译成其它四国语言的一周。

提到E3多人游戏关卡时，Daud喃喃自语道：“同步……同步。”

在这里，多人游戏模式的表现并不是很好。它带有同步问题，即当两个人一起在线游戏时便会出现错误和延迟情况。这是典型的多人游戏漏洞，但却是纠缠着《防御阵型2》团队好几个月的一大问题。而现在他们只剩下一周的时间去解决它了。

Pobst将对话带回测试和崩溃报告，他说道：“本周我们想要专注于这些人。我将进行标注并说道，‘嘿，这真的很棒；我们将提供给你们反馈，但本周我们不得不为E3做好准备。我们还需要为一个目标做好准备。我们还需要进行录音。并且需要完成本土化工作。’”

“这是回应测试的艰难一周。”

总之，这是《防御阵型2》开发以来最忙碌的一周。我们的脸上将充满不安，并且没有多少睡眠时间。紧张就像不速之客一般席卷着这支团队，并将在之后2个月时间里围绕着他们旋转。

分配好行动项目后，这次会议便结束了，Daud的脚步变的异常沉重，就好似整个世界都压在了他的肩上一样。

这便是游戏开发。

小小的戏剧化

经过证明，推出《防御阵型2》的测试版本是件困难的事。最初的测试版本发行日期是在2013年的11月或12月。然后，为了避免假期发行高峰以及全新Xbox One和PlayStation 4主机的问世，时间被推迟到了今年的2月。我在自己的日历上标注了该日期因为我需要出席这一活动。但是我到达了那里，我们的测试版本却并未到达。幸运的是，我们有其它可讨论的有趣话题。

在2014年春天的时候，我们清楚是时候再次推出测试版本，并且准确的发行日期是直至真正那一天的到来才定下来的。也就是在2014年5月末，Hidden Path及发行商505决定不能再等了。所以测试版本的发行最终确定了下来，Pobst发送了一封电子邮件，整个团队也开始执行任务。

然而，当最终日期到来时，测试版本却再次未能发行。出现了一些糟糕的问题，最终结构不能有效运行了。

Willoughby说道：“在我们尝试着推出测试版本的那一天，我们本应该进行检查锁定，即人们将不能检查各种内容，但我们却并未做到这点，从而导致人们的检查破坏了游戏。这是在发行后补前出现的情况。而因为我们是在快傍晚的时候才发现这一问题，所以我们只能顶着压力地去应对它。”

在《防御阵型2》开发的初始阶段，Hidden Path同样也致力于《升腾》以及未公开的实验音乐射击游戏《Chroma》中。而现在，因为在2014年初公布结束《Chroma》的工作，他们将完全致力于《防御阵型2》和《升腾》中。

该工作室将分散于《Chroma》的精力转移到了剩下的两个项目中。《升腾》需要努力实现越来越困难的发行目标（游戏邦注：Hidden Path的首席技术官Michael Asutin与团队搬到大房间完全致力于这款游戏的创造），而《防御阵型2》则受益于临时雇工的帮助去进行测试与问题的解决。

但临时雇工也会创造出一些麻烦—-未能精通专门为《防御阵型2》所创造的代码且不了解团队中的各种事宜，所以在游戏开发的第13个月时间里，开发者需要在一些不必要的细节中加快速度了。

Hidden Path的首席测试员Mark Shoemaker说道：“当我们进入开发的最后一个月时，我们将拥有一个日常进程，即早上的时候获得一个结构，并在下午2点前获得另外一个结构。我们必须确保能够优先考虑其中所存在的问题，并将其呈现给团队，然后贯穿结构开始工作。有许多测试工作便是反复检查同样的内容。”

Shoemaker不只是Hidden Path的首席测试员，他同样也是破坏了测试的一份子。

在测试版本发行的那一天，Shoemaker注意到音频编辑器中出现了一个漏洞，音效本应该一直循环着，但实际情况却不是如此。在SHoemaker眼中，这是一个必须被确定为错误设定的简单的“0到1”的标记。而因为不知道调用了“代码锁定”指令，即限制任何游戏改变，他主动做出了改变。

情况变得一团糟。

Shoemaker说道：“负责代码的人已经下班了。我便主动修改了漏洞。我并未改变游戏代码。我只是在音频编辑器中改变了一个标记，从而让音效能够循环运行。但我并未意识到的是那里并不存在一个代码去让循环停下来。”

因为音频引擎未得到修复，音频文件仍未能循环运行。Shoemaker的解决方法渲染了测试结构为不可游戏，而他甚至未能意识到这点。

在最终游戏测试时，循环音频文件最终被发现了。

Shoemaker说道：“在最后一分钟，当我们玩游戏时，我们发现，‘噢，声音设置毁掉了！’我们就像身处蜂巢中一般”

Shoemaker所谓的“蜂巢”是指团队陷入了恐慌与混乱中。总之情况就是不容乐观就是了。早上还好好的测试版本突然就崩溃了，甚至没人知道具体原因。

Shoemaker无意中听到了骚动，他的心瞬间一沉。因为他知道原因。是他破坏了游戏。

“我无意中听到有人说，‘为什么这会一直循环着？’我说，‘我知道为什么会这样。’”

Shoemaker与首席程序员Steve Messick共同去修补这一改变，但不管怎样破坏已经造成了。尽管改变本身很简单，但他们却不得不创造一个全新的结构并进行测试，而这需要团队耗费更长的时间。

Willoughby说道：“那时候，我们的创造者花了40分钟去创造一个新的结构。每当我们想要获得一个结构后补时，我们必须经历这一过程，即大概需要40分钟。当一天快要结束时，你基本上便拥有了它，然后你必须重新做某事。这更像是一大危机。修改问题虽然不需要花太长时间，但是重新创造结构却需要花费一定时间。”

测试再次遭遇了延迟。发行后补将在夜间被完成，但我们只能将发行时间推到隔天，即在原计划的24小时后。

Daud说道：“Jeff并不高兴。”他欲言又止，然后陷入了沉思。

之后我问他，当他表示“不高兴”时，Pobst看起来怎样。

“他的音量变高了。虽然未拍打桌子或其它任何东西。但很明显声音变大了。但并不是很愤怒。”

Shoemaker说道：“我可以说Pobst真的很受挫。我的感觉很糟糕。但即使到最后，Pobst走向我并说道，‘事情发生就发生了。’的确。犯错没关系。但却不能一错再错。”

事后，Willoughby将这一事件称为“小小的戏剧化”。为了支持“代码锁定”定义而添加了新规则，并推动了现在更大的《防御阵型2》团队间的交流。

测试人员

管理漏洞列表的工作落到了Shoemaker身上。作为首席测试员，他主要负责这些漏洞的组织与归类，并组织特定的游戏测试以确保不会出现更多漏洞，所以他可以使用数据过滤器去帮助程序员为漏洞分类，以明确哪些是需要关注的而哪些则可以忽视。

Shoemaker是从1998年开始作为一名QA测试员。当他还是一名音乐人时，因为他的乐队不能进行巡回演出，而QA测试工作能够帮助他轻松退出。不过最终，他决定认真对待这份工作，并想办法成为Surreal Software（华纳兄弟的一部分）的首席测试员。

Dacey Willoughby便是Shoemaker在Surreal的一个同事。

Shoemaker说道：“她选择离开我们在这家名为Hidden Path的小公司工作，致力于这款谁也没听过的塔防游戏。然后有一天我便看到了这封邮件：Dacey的游戏发行了，这款塔防游戏出现在了Steam上。接下来便是所有人都在玩这款游戏。我们也在玩它。所以我便对《防御阵型》上瘾了，然后我也有幸能够见到Jeff（Pobst）。”

于是Shoemaker获得了这份工作。

当《防御阵型2》即将完成时，他将负责监督外部测试团队。因为Hidden Path是一家小型独立工作室，所以它并未拥有自己的内部测试部门。于是它将与发行商505的QA团队合作并雇佣一些外部测试员去进行游戏的QA工作。

Shoemaker将协调这些团队与Hidden Path的内部员工去优化游戏并修改漏洞。

他说道：“我知道与外部人士合作是至关重要的。我们必须进行交流，觉得自己可以在任何方面与某些人进行联系，因为一些小问题有可能会让你忙活一整天并破坏你的生产力。当提到发行某些内容时，如果我们与外部QA合作，我们就必须组织好打算询问他们的问题，然后确保清楚如何利用他们的努力。这真的是很重要的一部分。”

就像Hidden Path的许多员工一样，Shoemaker也是他所处的领域的专家。听他谈论如何构建一个测试程序，如何判别一名测试员的好坏以及如何向开发团队报告数据就跟坐在该领域的讲习班听课一样。这将有效地吸引人们的注意。

他是一个喜欢探寻根源的人。在描述自己为何选择进入QA领域时，他讲了一个名为“Big Track”的玩具的故事。

“它是源自20世纪80年代。它就像是一辆卡车。又有点像《质量效应》的坦克。你可以对其进行编程。我的哥哥大我9岁。他对编程非常感兴趣。他对自己的Big Track进行编程。他遇到了一个困难的部分，即卡车总是会倒下，于是他将其递给了我，这个比他小的孩子。我心想，‘喔，这真的很棒！’”

“我只是在背部打了一下数字，它便立刻朝前行进，并右转下了楼梯。于是这便注定了我们未来的发展方向。他成为了一名程序员而我成为了一名测试员。”

“‘它是否会下楼梯？’是的，它会。我期待看到它能够自己停下来或出现错误，而不是前往某处。但它的确如此。它最终下了楼梯。”

jimmy legs

在《防御阵型2》团队遭遇巨大威胁的时候，首席美术师Lex Story带来了希望之光。

美术团队被重重困难所包裹着。在重新设计了几乎每一个高塔和组块的外观后，Lex Story及其团队转向一些较小的漏洞修复工作以及一些繁琐的细节内容。现在他们可能会转向Hidden Path的其它项目或随时准备好投入意外的修复工作中。

“我尝试了许多功能延伸，‘嘿，你知道什么才真正酷毙了？’当然了，制作人并不喜欢这样。她在听到这种类型的戏谑后会大发雷霆，在她还没离开之前说，‘等等，我们是否还有时间？’我想我们已经添加了一些我们真正觉得酷的内容，即我们可以加以利用的内容。但是当我们到达这一点时，你知道发生了什么？我们获得了一切。我们只需要创造内容便可。”

现在的Story正在做一件自己最讨厌的事：等待。这为他留下了许多时间去基于自己在游戏中最喜欢的新目标的改变创造骚动。

Story告诉我：“我将其称为万能钥匙。”“钥匙”是在《防御阵型2》开发末尾添加的一个元素。即目的是作为游戏内部玩家的角色，“钥匙”将在游戏一开始的一个关卡中出现并插进防御阵型中，实际上便是“打开了它”，然后带给玩家控制权。就像真的钥匙一般。同样的，因为玩家从理论上是骑着它的，所以它也是一艘船。

现在的官方说法是“指挥飞机”。

Story说道：“他们并未告诉我他们不会使用万能钥匙这一名字，尽管我一直竭力争取。每个人都愿意接纳它并将我的标准带到战斗中。‘是的！它就是万能钥匙！’，然后上周他们告诉我，‘噢，我们将不管他让他继续说着这些疯话。我们就要接近最后，那时候我们将把炸弹丢向他。’”

“这就像拿标枪刺穿我的心一般。”

Story现在的正式任务是致力于《防御阵型2》的画集，即提供给Kickstarter活动的支持者的礼物。

Story说道：“关于你投入多少于思考过程中以及你真正呈现给消费者多少内容是个让人惊讶的结果。所以这边是该美术集的目的。我们想要传达的是，‘嘿，我喜欢作为消费者的你们。我们欣赏你们。我们想要呈现给你们一些内容。’”

在这之后Story的工作还未决定。他表示自己能够转向下一个项目了，但下一个项目到底是什么却还不知道。Pobst现在正忙于其它业务中，所以暂且不会涉及团队中的任何协议，这与减少关键时刻的压力也没有任何关系。

关于这一点的专业术语是业务开发，但这真的只是一种推搡。作为独立开发商，Hidden Path不得不自己买单，而它选择与发行商签订协议去制作特殊的游戏，或接受投资去发行自己的游戏。这些钱将用于支付开发者的工资以及制作游戏的成本，如果还有剩，那将用于拮据时候的储备。只有非常成功或非常幸运的游戏开发者能够通过一款游戏创造足够的利润去资助其它游戏。这是大多数开发者所追求的，但却只有少数人才能真正做到。

因为与非《防御阵型2》的项目相关的业务事宜并不属于这一报道的范围之内，所以我并不想透露关于《防御阵型》财务的细节。尽管我知道这些信息，但是因为我答应了Hidde Path，所以我并不打算在此进行报道。

但我能肯定的是，作为一个整体的Hidden Path与Lex Story是被栓在同一条船上的两只蚂蚱：他们完成了各自的任务并期待着接下来会发生什么。

对于该公司在致力于《防御阵型2》所面对的所有时间表，其团队将会一一完成它们。Daud会在办公室待到晚上11点，并在空闲时间继续制作游戏。他们将为E3准备好合作模式。并为本土化准备好文本。为在洛杉矶的录音准备好脚本内容。并按时完成与发行商的约定。之后他们将重置时间表，并将新的目标添加到日历中，而游戏开发也将继续。

在《防御阵型2》的主机版本经过认证，以及最终发行都只剩下几周的时间了。这便是游戏开发。

附录

在我发布本文时，Hidden Path通知我他们的团队发生了一些改变。

在某种程度上，“业务开发”获得了成功。很快地，Hidden Path将开始致力于一个新项目，该项目将能维持该工作室以及《防御阵型2》的团队的发展。

尽管《防御阵型》从策略上来看拥有一个适当的时机，但是它却不是一个要求特定的美术专长的项目，就像他们只能放走其中的两位雇员。他们分别是Kevin Loza和《防御阵型2》的美术总监Lex Story。

根据Hidden Path，在新游戏中并没有具有独特技能的美术师的容身之地，他们也没有额外的预算能够留住他们。

Story虽然很难接受这一事实，但他却并未责怪任何人。他意识到自己是特殊类型的美术师，带有机械引擎背景并偏向于为战争创造武器。

Story说道：“我并不会让这件事打倒自己。我可不是温室里脆弱的花朵。”

如今，Story正在决定自己的下一个项目，或者他有可能继续待在游戏产业中。他的第一款游戏是《Return to Zork》。他是一个21岁的产业老手。同时也是一位接受过训练的大厨。他知道背景和经验赋予了自己强大的能力，但同时也让自己很难去适应各种团队。

当然了，并不是只有Story有这样的遭遇。

电子游戏产业一直处于快速变化中，那些非常厉害的老手们也都是从普通人中进化而来，或者身价变得更加昂贵而难以继续留在团队中。尽管Story的境况更倾向于后者，但是现在的他正积极寻找一个适合自己的新去处。

而对于许许多多游戏开发者来说，新去处同样也是游戏开发。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转功，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

The front lines: How a beta makes a game better

By Russ Pitts

More than a year after it started, development on Defense Grid 2 is in the final stage.

It is now May 2014. The Defense Grid 2 team leads at Hidden Path, Associate Producer Dacey Willoughby, Executive Producer Jeff Pobst, Programming Lead Steve Messick, Design Lead John Daud and self-described “dev support guy” Jon Lee are sitting around a table in a room between the kitchen and the rest of the office. There’s a Neo Geo arcade cabinet in the corner, board games on shelves against the wall.

This room is usually where the team gathers for fun. This meeting will not be fun.

The Defense Grid 2 beta launched a week before this meeting. Thousands of players have been playing the game. Most of the feedback has been positive. (Too positive, Pobst thinks. He will obsess about the feedback being possibly biased.) But there have also been bug reports.

Beta players are encouraged to send in a report if they discover a problem when playing the beta. Hidden Path has been collecting those, and now has a list. This meeting’s purpose is to sort through them, and make a plan to fix them. If that was all the team had to worry about, the mood would be considerably lighter. It is not.

“This is a very large number of crashes,” says Pobst, surveying the list. Portions of the list have been handwritten. It is the most recent tally of “crash” issues reported in the beta. There are around 200 of them.

Pobst wonders if all 200 reported crashes are each unique, meaning 200 separate things that are causing the game to crash. That is yet to be determined, but chances are they are not unique, and that many of the emails are reporting the same thing.

Finding someone to go through the list to determine what is causing each crash, and if they’re related, will be tricky. Everyone is busy with other things.

This week there’s a milestone for delivering a build of the game to publisher 505. It’s also the last week the team has to work on the multiplayer demo being shown at E3 in two weeks. It is also the week all in-game text must be finalized and sent to the localization team that will be translating English into four other languages.

Mention of the E3 multiplayer level causes Daud to shake his head miserably and mutter, “The sync … the sync.”

The multiplayer isn’t doing so well. It has a syncing issue, which creates errors and lags when two people are playing together online. It’s a typical multiplayer bug, but one that has been nagging the Defense Grid 2 team for months. They now have only a week left to finally fix it.

“This week we want to take care of these people,” Pobst says, bringing the conversation back to the beta and the crash reports. “And I’ll put up a note and say, ‘Hey, this is awesome; we’ll give you feedback, but this week we have to be ready for E3. We have to be ready for a milestone. We have to get the voice stuff recording. We gotta be prepared for [localization].’

“This is a tough week to be super responsive to the beta.”

This is, in short, the most intense week so far of production on Defense Grid 2, and the strain is starting to show. Voices are sharper, tempers shorter. Faces are lined with worry and lack of sleep. The tension is crowding in on this team like an uninvited guest, and it’s going to be around for another two months.

Action items are assigned, the meeting breaks up, and Daud, lumbering to his feet as if the weight of the world were on his shoulders, says he’ll be off “making the rest of the game … in my spare time.”

This is game development.

A LITTLE BLIP OF DRAMA

Simply getting the Defense Grid 2 beta out the door proved to be difficult. The original beta launch date was sometime in November or December of 2013. Then, to avoid the crush of holiday releases and the then-new Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles, it was pushed into February. I have the date on my calendar because I was supposed to be present for the event. I arrived, the beta didn’t. Luckily (for me and you) we had the subject of making fun to talk about.

By spring 2014 it had become clear the beta would be pushed out again, with the exact release date in flux almost until the very day. By the end of May 2014, Hidden Path and publisher 505 could wait no longer. The beta was scheduled, Pobst sent out an email and the team was put into action.

And then when the day finally came … the beta didn’t go out. Something had gone wrong, and the final build no longer worked.

“The day we were trying to get the beta out … we should have done a check-in lockdown, where people can’t check things in, but we didn’t, and so somebody checked something in that broke the game,” says Willoughby. “It was right before a release-candidate type thing. That was late in the afternoon, so it was kind of stressful.”

At the start of Defense Grid 2′s development, Hidden Path was also working on Windborne and the then-unannounced experimental musical shooter, Chroma. Now, with its work on Chroma officially wrapped up in early 2014, it has just Defense Grid 2 and Windborne in the works.

The third of the studio devoted to Chroma has now been diverted to the two remaining projects. Windborne needed staffing up to hit increasingly complex prerelease targets (Hidden Path CTO Michael Austin moved into the bullpen with the team to focus solely on creating the game), and Defense Grid 2 would benefit from the extra hands to beef up testing and problem solving.

But the extra hands would inevitably create hiccups, as developers — not steeped in the intricacies of code created solely for Defense Grid 2 and unaware of long-established and accepted practices — were brought up to speed on the minutiae of a game now in its 13th month of development.

“As we get into the last month of development here, we will have a daily process where we get a build in the morning, and we’ll probably have another build by 2 p.m.,” says Mark Shoemaker, Hidden Path’s lead tester. “We have to make sure we prioritize the issues in it, and demonstrate to the team, and just start working through build churn. A lot of testing is checking the same thing over and over again.”

Shoemaker would know. Not only is he the head of testing at Hidden Path; he’s also the one who broke the beta.

On the day of the beta release Shoemaker noticed a bug in the audio editor, a sound effect that should have been looping but wasn’t. It was a simple “zero to one” flag that, to Shoemaker’s eye, had been set in the wrong position. So, unaware that a “code lockdown” had been called, restricting any changes to the game, he made the change.

And all hell broke loose.

“The person that was in charge of the code in that area had gone home for the day,” says Shoemaker. “I had fixed a bug … I didn’t even make a code change to the game. I made a flag change in the audio editor that turned looping on for a sound effect. What I didn’t realize is that there was no code telling the looping to stop.”

The audio file was left to not loop, because of a flaw in the audio engine that hadn’t yet been fixed. Shoemaker’s “solution” had rendered the beta build unplayable and he didn’t even know it.

The looping audio file was discovered during a final play test.

“At the last minute, we were playing the game, and ‘Oh, sound is suddenly broken!’” Shoemaker says. “There was this little beehive of activity going on.”

What Shoemaker described as a “beehive” has been characterized by some as panic and others as chaos. Whatever the exact definition, it was not good. The beta, which had been working fine earlier in the day, was now broken, and no one knew why.

Shoemaker happened to overhear the commotion and his heart sank. He knew why. He’d broken it.

“I casually overheard somebody say, ‘Why is this looping?’ And I said, ‘I know why that’s looping.’”

Shoemaker worked with Programming Lead Steve Messick to revert the change, but the damage had been done. Although the change itself was simple, an entire new build had to be created — and tested — which would take time the team no longer had.

“At the time our builder was taking like 40 minutes to make a build,” says Willoughby. “Every time we wanted to get a build candidate, we had to go through that process, and it would be like 40 minutes. When you’re getting close to the end of the day, it’s like, you almost had it, and then you had to redo something. It was more of a crisis than normal. Fixing the problem didn’t take very long, but then rebuilding takes a little while.”

The beta was delayed. Again. A release candidate would be complete later that evening, but it wouldn’t be released until the next day, roughly 24 hours later than planned.

“Jeff was not happy,” says Daud, then begins to say something and stops, gets lost in thought and falls silent.

I ask him, later, what Pobst looks like when he’s “not happy.”

“There were some raised voices. It’s articulate. It’s not pounding on the table or anything. It is concise and direct and kinda loud. But not ragey. But you’ll know it when it’s happening.”

“I could tell [Pobst] was frustrated,” Shoemaker says. “I felt really bad. But even at the end of it all … [Pobst] came to me later on and said, ‘This stuff happens.’ And it does. … [But] making mistakes is OK. Making them twice is not. If that makes sense.”

After the fact, Willoughby would call the event “a little blip of drama.” New rules were put in place to shore up the definitions of “code lockdown” and increase communication on the now larger-than-ever Defense Grid 2 team.

TESRER MAN

The job of managing the bug list falls to Shoemaker. As lead tester, he’s in charge of organizing and cataloging those bugs, and organizing the play tests designed to ensure there aren’t any more bugs, and so he’s gotten the task of applying filters to the data coming out of the beta to help the programmers sort out which bugs to pay attention to, versus which ones might be ignored.

Shoemaker got his start as a QA tester in 1998. As a musician, QA testing was a great gig when his band wasn’t touring, and he could easily quit when it was. Eventually he got serious about the job and worked his way up to test lead at now-defunct Surreal Software, a part of Warner Bros.
Interactive.

One of Shoemaker’s co-workers at Surreal was one Dacey Willoughby.

“She bailed on us to go work for this little tiny company called Hidden Path, working on this tower defense game nobody had heard of,” Shoemaker says. “Then … this email went around one day: Dacey’s game came out, this tower defense game, and it’s on Steam. Next thing you know, everybody’s playing it. We’re all playing it. So I got hooked on Defense Grid, and then just through the luck of the draw, I ended up having a chance to talk to Jeff [Pobst].”

Shoemaker got the job.

As Defense Grid 2 gets closer to completion he will also be in charge of overseeing the external testing teams, when the time comes. Since Hidden Path is a small, independent studio, it does not have its own internal testing department. It will be working with publisher 505′s QA team and also hiring a group of external testers to do QA on the game.

Shoemaker will coordinate the efforts of those teams with Hidden Path’s staffers’ work to polish the game and eradicate bugs.

“One of the things I know that’s critical with working with anybody outside is access,” he says. “Access to communication, feeling like you can touch base with somebody about anything, because a little tiny question will eat at you all day and break your productivity if it doesn’t get satisfied in some way. … When it comes to shipping something, when we’re working with outside QA, we have to be organized with what we’re asking of them, and we have to make sure that we know how we’re going to be utilizing their effort. So that’s really a big part of it right there.”

Just like many who work at Hidden Path, Shoemaker is an expert in his field. Listening to him talk about how to structure a test program, what to look for in a good tester and how to report data back to a development team is like sitting in on a master class in a field that’s so overlooked most people would never assume it could be so complex. It is at once fascinating and a little overwhelming.

He is a man who enjoys breaking things in any way they can possibly be broken, just to find out what happens. To illustrate why he got into QA in the first place, he tells a story about a toy called the “Big Track.”

“It was from the 1980s. It looks like a truck. Kind of looks like the tank from Mass Effect. You could program it. My brother is nine years ahead of me. He’s interested in programming. He’s programming his Big Track to do things. It’s got the little dump-truck section on the back to dump toys out or whatever. And he hands it to me, and I’m much younger than him. I’m thinking, ‘Oh, this is awesome!’ I was 5 or something.

“I just typed a couple numbers into the back, and it immediately goes forward and then turns right to go down the stairs. He goes, ‘Nononono!’ That was immediately … our paths were set. He was going to become a programmer and I was going to become a tester.

“‘Will it go down stairs?’ Yes, it does. I kind of expected to see if it would stop itself or have an error, not going to go there. But it did. It totally went down the stairs. I’ve been sending software down the stairs ever since.”

JIMMY LEGS

Amidst the sea of chaos currently threatening to drown the Defense Grid 2 team, the one bright spot of calm is, unexpectedly, Art Lead Lex Story.

Against all odds, the art team is wrapped. After redesigning the look of almost every tower and mob after the PAX reveal, Lex Story and his team have moved on to minor bugs fixes and niggling details. They will now either move on to other projects at Hidden Path or else be on standby to jump in on emergency fixes.

“We did a lot of [feature] creep stuff where we would go, ‘Hey, you know what would be really cool?’ Of course the producer hates that. She gets all wigged out over hearing that kind of banter in the background, without her going, ‘Wait a minute; do we have time on the schedule?’ I think we’ve done really well with adding some additional things that we thought were really cool, that we could work with. I… But then we got to a point where, you know what? We’ve got everything. We just need to create content.”

With that done, Story is now doing the one thing he hates most: Waiting. Which leaves him plenty of time for creating ruckus over the change to one of his favorite new objects in the game.

“I called it the master key,” Story tells me. The “key” (or, as he sometimes called it, the “boat”) is an element added late in Defense Grid 2′s development. Intended to serve as an in-game avatar for the player, the “key” would fly into a level at the start of the game and socket into the defense grid, “turning it on” in effect, and giving the player control. Like a key. And also, because the player is theoretically riding in it, a boat.

It is now officially called “the command shuttle.”

“They wouldn’t tell me that they weren’t going to use the name master key, even though I was trying to drum up all this support behind me,” says Story. “Everyone would adopt it and carry my standard into battle. ‘Yes! It is called the master key!’ And then they told me last week … ‘Oh, well, we’re just going to let him go on and do his crazy talk and insane gesticulations. We’ll get close enough to the end where we’ll just drop it on him like a bomb.’

“Pierced my heart with a lawn dart.”

Story’s current official task is to work on the Defense Grid 2 art book, a giveaway for backers of the Kickstarter campaign.

“It’s just amazing how much you put into the thought process and how much you actually show the customer,” Story says. “So that’s what the artbook is going to do. It’s going to basically go, ‘Hey, we like you guys as a customer. We appreciate you guys. We want to show you a little bit.’”

What will be next for Story after that is still to be decided. He says he’s really “got the jimmy legs” to move on to his next project, but what that project will be is still up in the air. Pobst is currently drumming up additional business, putting deals together for whatever the team (and, presumably, Story) will work on next, which does nothing to decrease the stress at this critical time.

The technical term for this is business development or “biz dev,” but it’s really just hustle. As an independent developer, Hidden Path has to pay its own bills, and it does this by signing deals with publishers to make specific games, or accepting investment (from crowdsourced backers or money men like Steven Dengler) to publish its own titles. The money that comes in goes to pay developer salaries and cover costs of making a game, and if there’s any left over, then that’s just cushion for the lean times. Only the very successful or extremely lucky game developers will make enough profit from one game to completely fund another. That’s the brass ring most developers reach for, but few actually come near.

As business matters pertaining to projects that aren’t Defense Grid 2 are outside the scope of this reporting, I’m not privy to the details of Hidden Path’s finances, what potential games Hidden Path might be working on next or who the company is “biz deving” with. And in cases where I am made aware of that information, as part of my agreement with Hidden Path (and out of respect for the sensitivity of their business matters and potential impact on employees and partners) I do not report it.

What is safe to say, however, is that Hidden Path as a whole is in the same boat as Lex Story: wrapping up the tasks on its plate and looking ahead to whatever will be next. And perhaps worrying there might be too long a gap between one and the other.

As for all of the milestones staring the company in the face for Defense Grid 2, the team will hit them all. Daud will be in the office until 11 p.m., making the game in his spare time. But the co-op level will be ready for E3. The text will be ready for localization. The scripts will be ready for voice recording in Los Angeles. The publisher milestone will be hit. The clock will be reset, new milestones will be added to the calendar and the development of the game will continue.

There are mere weeks left on the schedule before the console version of Defense Grid 2 must ship for certification, and slightly more than that left before launch. This is game development.

- ADDENDUM -

Just days before this article was set to publish, Hidden Path informed me that there have been changes to its team.

The “biz dev” has been successful, to a point. Starting immediately, Hidden Path will begin work on a new project, which will sustain the studio and much of the Defense Grid 2 team as it rolls off the project.

In spite of it coming at a strategically opportune time for Hidden Path, however, it will not be a project that requires certain artistic specialities, such as those of two employees let go. Those two employees are Kevin “Particle Man” Loza and Defense Grid 2 Art Lead Lex Story.

According to Hidden Path, there wasn’t a place on the new game for artists with their unique skill sets, and there was no extra room in the budget to keep them around while the company found other work for them to do.

Story took the news hard, but he doesn’t blame anyone. He recognizes he’s a very specific type of artist, with a mechanical engineering background and a penchant for creating weapons of war.

“I’m not gonna let it crush me,” Story says. “I’m not a delicate flower by any means.”

Story is currently deciding what his next project will be, or if he’ll even remain in the game industry. His first game was Return to Zork. He’s a 21-year veteran of the industry and a Marine. And a trained chef. He is intensely aware that his background and experience make him both extremely capable and also potentially harder to fit in a variety of teams.

This is not unique to Story.

The video game industry changes so rapidly its most accomplished veterans are often evolved out of the ranks, or become too expensive to keep on the team. Although Story’s situation is more the latter than the former, he is nevertheless now on his own, looking for a new place to call home.

And this, all too often, for far too many game developers, is also game development.(source:polygon)