A Wombat's Journey To Market

The increasingly entertaining Next Generation has the story of the fictional game "Chortle Wombat's" journey from design to market. From the article: "Our internal testers have been working with the wombat for months. The game is content complete, stable, and bugs counts are dropping daily at a satisfactory rate. So we submit a build to Sony and Microsoft for presubmission and continue beavering (wombating?) away. This presubmission means Sony and Microsoft's test departments can get their hands on the current build and get some early visibility on what might need to be fixed when they receive a release candidate."

Comments

You forgot the part...

[alvinrod]

Where EA overworks all of the programmers, the voice actors complain about not being paid enough, and the months of hype piled on by the marketing department and gaming magazines that have only have seen maybe .2% of the game, and only the best looking .2%

All-in-all, not a bad article. It was a fairly interesting read that expanded nicely on a few things, but really told many game fans a lot of things that we already knew. I'd like to see a more in-depth look at an actual game, rather than a hypothetical example.

Summary

[Otter]

To save everyone the trouble of reading:

In the late stages of development, testers look for bugs and the developers try to fix them. When they're done, they make CDs, package them and send them to retailers. On trucks.

Re:Summary

[nomadic]

Now we know!

And knowing is half the battle!

Re:Summary

[kaellinn18]

developers try to fix them

You misspelled ignore. At least that's how it feels like sometimes.

Re:Summary

[DocWat232]

Actually, it's only one third of the battle... We're losing.

Re:Summary

[Balaam's Donkey]

In the late 90's, my brother worked QA for Acclaim. All they did was drink lots of jolt cola and play quake from 8pm to 4am. If the other game companies use similar squads of caffeined up 20 year olds to "QA" their products, is the "quality" of their software any surprise?

whatever.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever.

No wonder publishers miss their dates so often!

[Nipok Nek]

I think someone needs to check their math. Sept 1 to Oct 15th is six weeks on my calendar, not ten. Nipok Nek

Re:No wonder publishers miss their dates so often!

[stienman]

See, that's why most people don't understand the game software industry.

You neglected to include the extra four weeks of overtime the employees "donate" to the project. This may seem like a lot, but it only means 6 eleven hour workdays a week, leaving 13 hours every day, and all day sunday, for the employees to have fun.

Quite frankly this is an average 'ideal' schedule, as advertised by the author in the article. Just ask EA.

-Adam

Re:No wonder publishers miss their dates so often!

[Anonymous Coward]

That jumped out at me too. I know that some months might have an extra week in them, depending on how you reckon weeks, but I couldn't figure out anyway to squeeze 10 weeks into a month and a half. I think the article writer meant to say August 1st - there would be 10 weeks between Aug 1 and Oct 15.

Wombat?

[dacarr]

Only in this industry can we get a WOMBAT to market.

Must already be released

[Flendon]

The game is content complete, stable, and bugs counts are dropping daily at a satisfactory rate.

If this is the case then the game must have already been on store shelves and be on the fourth or fifth patch.

They skipped the part I was looking for

[tepples]

The article entirely skipped the part about getting the company and the title licensed by each console maker. Some startup development firms consider getting published a nearly insurmountable obstacle. Is there another article that covered this phase of the development of Chortle Wombat?