murder simulators

I'd like to rename this column "Murder simulators"

if you're curious about what happend

about the 'tester bug'? As far as I know, it's still in the game. There's much worse problems with the game.

Which reminds me, that's another way things can fuck up in the game industry. What the developer will do is not be able to fix small bugs because they just can't achieve stability. Which means it runs. without crashing. That's of course on a whole different level of severity and must be addressed.

But what happens is that- oops, that little stuff just isnt important. It's just polish anyway. Which is of course what separates good, from bad, from mediocre games.


Then, timewise then, you get the worst thing in the game industry right now. Consoles can patch. Oh shit, now they can update! Which you'd think would be agood thing but what it means is that as soon as you pick up a new game, as soon as you connect, you have to download the update for it.

This makes developers lazy. This makes developers lazy. They don't fix things because they know they can put out a patch for it. I know for a fact A lot of bugs got waived, pushed to the next version because of this. I'm not even kidding. A lot of people in the game industry i've talked to have said the same. Makes 'em lazy.

So the worst games, you'll have to download multiple patches, or the patch will be a really high number. bad sign.

DLC!

how's it going?

So my contract finally expired at Sony. i guess i'm looking for work now. I can animate and model & texture in Maya. I can do character design.

http://thejeremycampbellexperience.com/index.html

Let me know if you find out anything.

definiton of a 'tester bug'

Here's a bug i found awhile back. I can't tell you what game i'm working on (even though it has been released) or where i'm employed at, so i don't get into trouble NDA-wise. but i just can't let this one slide because i think it illustrates how it is that things go wrong in games.

When the user's character throws a grenade, the pin is still attached.

WTF? I mean damn, how does something like that get by? you may be asking yourself. i mean, anyone who's seen any movies knows you gotta pull the pin to arm a grenade. And this game is supposed to be 'realistic'.

A 'tester bug' is a bug that only testers would find. We find them by doing weird, counterintuitive shit that doesn't win us the game. It's also kind of a negative term, and often used as a rationale to close bugs. Ordinary people supposedly never do these things. To find that grenade bug for instance, you'd have to walk over and inspect a live grenade, instead of running in the opposite direction. But do you think it will never be noticed by anyone, ever?

Little things like this send a message: We don't care. Polish. Polish is what separates the good developers from the ones who are in it for the paycheck.

How does something like this happen? Probably, the modeler was given the assignment 'model a grenade'. He does it, checks in the asset. Goes to the pub. Programmer writes code that spawns a grenade when the user gives the command to throw one. He just makes a reference to the asset, he never even sees it. It's neither of their job, really, to make sure it's used correctly. But no one looked to see that the user's haracter was throwing a grenade with an attached pin. No one's looking at the big picture and that's the problem.

It's Test's job to find it. Okay, we found it. What happens now?

By the way, the bug was closed. (waived, actually, which means it's pushed back to the next patch) Will it ever be addressed? Who knows? That's another thing mediocre developers do- slack off on everything until something gets to a crisis point and then use that as an excuse to only work on the most egregious bugs. Again, i'm not mentioning any developer's names here, please don't sue me.

game development

i'm gonna use this space to put down a few things i've learned from my time in games. From the test point of view, which is where i am now. I've been on the development side as well, so i have an idea of what goes on there. i have an idea of what's blame-worthy or not. because sometimes, you'll just have an honest bug. Look- all games have bugs, before they go out- that's the facts of life in software development. I'm saying that you can judge a developer- you can tell if the developer is any good or not by the quality of their bugs.

And whether they get fixed or not.
And in what order.
And does fixing them cause more bugs?
And do they stay fixed, or reappear later?

(oh my god i have stories for each of these) I'd probably violate my NDA if i told these, and probably get fired, so i'll have to generalize.


Notice that all of these factors have nothing to do with whether the game is fun or not.That's a whole nother can of worms, but that tells you a lot about the developer as well. Ask yourself questions like this:
Does the game make things that you would think would be fun into tedious chores?
or
Does the game make things you might not think of normally as fun into fun experiences?
Is it fun just to move around in the game?


more to come on this subject for sure...

QA

I also wanted to tell you my idea for a tv series. It'd be an episodic ensemble-cast comedy sort of in the vein of 'the Office'. But it's about testers for a major software company. i think there's a lot of potential for humor(i see it as very grim, Dilbert-style humor) in that sort of setting. Also, I think now everybody knows about video games and enough people are in the tech industry that i think a lot of the jokes wouldn't go over people's heads.

Ensemble Cast- There's a lot of potential for weird, interesting characters. It's really pretty diverse bunch of characters, different races, different genders, different stages in life, all in it for different reasons.

Yeah, really original, i know. I'm inspired by my real life. But i think i could make it interesting, funny and watchable. I suppose what i should do now is write out a pilot. I'd like to shoot a video of a sample episode. Some vignettes, maybe, slices of life, really, they don't have to fit together into a plot yet. I think it'd be cool to use people from work as my actors, i guess i should have at least a script ready to approach them with. I know some people who would be totally down with it.

right now i'm putting ideas together to see how much material i have.What do you think? Good Idea? if you want to give me money to film my idea please email me at :jeremy.campbell@gmail.com










Marketing department:
Everyone's young, beautiful, chuggin' red bulls all the time and pulling mad crazy overtime, then going out to the club 'cuz why bother to go to sleep

changes

So now i've got a job working at Sony. FPQA Test.First Party Qa Test. Testing games for the PS3. There's not much more i can say. NDA you know. But anyway, it's limited. Short term contract. Big company, well established ways of doing things. Reminds me a lot of when i worked at SEGA, way back in the days of the Saturn. Yeah.

You don't hear much of me lately cause i'm dealing with setting up my life around my new job and the baby. The game i'm on is going into crunch time so it's overtime for everyone.
Another thing i remember from way back when i worked at SEGA. i was a younger guy back then and living by myself, i could take as much overtime as they offered. But now i have to have someone set up to take care of the baby. Takes up more of my time.

Which is why my second demo reel is moving so slowly. I'm going to make a second one, put it up on YouTube again. It's going to be modeling and texturing. But theres also going to be some animation. I'm excited about it. I'm excited about the music.

here's my demo reel

Up on YouTube.

It's just my animation work. I'm trying to get a job at Pixar. I know, everyone wants that.

my website

Upon which you may see my art-work:

thejeremycampbellexperience.com