Oh man, this is a lot of bugs we are finding. Too many, I think. But in the end, it will work out. I'd like to explain a little what I've been thinking since the beta testing began.
I remember I started once on a project where the last project manager had given up on it, and I was stepping into his shoes. On the first day, I was trying to figure out what the state of the software was, so I decided to sit down and enter bugs. I found that I could enter as many bugs as I had time to type. As soon as I finished entering one bug, I would try something else in the app and BAM! ...there was another bug. The project was in a horrible state! It had been thrown together by a bunch of unexperienced coders, and my team and I went through horrible pains with it. Eventually it was canceled, in my opinion, because we were spending too much time fixing field problems generated by premature "
ship it!"
mandates. The rule I formed was that you cannot gauge how long it will take to fix all the bugs in a project, until there is some delay in the time it takes to find them. You can't tell if it will take two weeks to clean everything up or two years.
So how do you think I felt when DROD looked like this past failure? Before beta started, DROD was in that same as-many-bugs-as-you-can-enter state. I was angry and worried about it. I only get 16 hours each week to work on this thing and those 16 hours had to be fought for. Mike spends a similar amount of time. We both have competing commitments--the cost of well-rounded lives--and making sure the bug-fixing work gets done takes a less-than-casual attitude. Before Mike and I can get to a point where we can justify changing our lives to make more time for writing games, we've got to get through this beta and several more hurdles. So there is a lot of drama in this release for me. It is not just something I do for fun--my dreams are tied up in it.
But I think things are clearing up a bit now, and it is possible to start judging how much work is left. I am thinking maybe (wince) a few months of beta are still ahead of us. That's a lot of time. I'm worried about people getting burned out. The people who know a lot about DROD and help out in the committed way I've seen are not easy to find.
I think we need to focus on bugs that cause data loss. These bugs are severe and, of course, we don't want them to appear in the release. But the real reason to concentrate on them is so that people can work on editing real holds without all the trouble. This should make testing more fun, and maybe keep us from losing people.
Mike has been fixing every bug that comes up, with a little help from Schik (yay!) and me. So I don't think there is a bottleneck on the development side. The testers are dumping plenty of bugs on us, although I plan to do some more recruiting, because I would rather have testers be ahead of devs. The more bugs we discover, the better. In order to get data loss bugs fixed sooner, you might keep in mind a few things:
- When DROD crashes, there is a fair chance you'll have lost data or not be able to start DROD again (your data was corrupted). As soon as DROD crashes, try and think about what you were doing before it crashed. What was the very last thing?
- If you can figure out how to reproduce the crash, that is PURE GOLD as far as bug reports go. After the crash, try to get it to crash again while it is still fresh in your mind what you were doing.
- Read the "
Changes from Build X"
messages and follow instructions for installation. If you copy files around to make an ad-hoc solution to problems you are having, it is likely to generate false bugs that we don't want to spend time on.
- Failed imports and exports are pretty important. If an IMPORT fails, the problem may actually be in the EXPORT. To aid in troubleshooting failed imports, keep an extra installation of the previous build around and hold onto files in the "
homemade"
directory.
- If nobody replied to your bug post with "
it's fixed in next build"
or "
I entered it into the database"
, then please reply to your own post, i.e. "
Hey what about my bug?"
and it will bump it up to the top of the board again. I don't want to miss any bugs. It is easy to do with the flood of posts and e-mails coming in. (I've been getting 100+ DROD-related e-mails each day!)
- Feature requests are still welcome, but we are in a middle of a war here! (Or maybe just I am.
) The severe bugs still in the code can seriously destroy our momentum. You guys do what you're willing to do, but for myself, I need to be disciplined about moving towards that release by fixing bugs. So if you are wondering what to report on next, look for severe bugs.
List of things for me to remember:
- These people are helping me out for free and I should be nice to them.
- Don't get too serious or somebody will need to slap you.
- Take some meat out of the freezer for dinner.
-Erik
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The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
Decent Apps - open source tools for writing and deploying privacy-focused LLM-based web apps.
