I must have learned programming wrong, then, because dear ducking god, the amount of incompetent shit I have to see is surreal.
One system we’ve got from a different state was marketed as having geolocation. It doesn’t. All object relations have to be created manually in a separate page, as in, you register a city, then register an address, THEN, on a different page, you connect the two. Now imagine this for some 24 objects. It has some specific profile permissions hard coded by id (like, only profile with id 4 can create some stuff)
This is just the shit I remember off the top of my head. The cherry on top is that they didn’t validate unique emails for users, you could have 999 users with the same email and no way for them to reset their passwords. I asked why: “we didn’t think about it”
I asked why: “we didn’t think about it”
I have Simon Pegg in Hot Fuzz ringing in my ears: “IT’S YOUR JOB!”
You won’t have time after spending all day complaining about bad documentation.
I seem to complain more, actually.
It’s a bell curve.
I am still complaining, but now I blame the managers
“wow, what director level ass pushed them so hard that they had to leave that bug in?”
I think of the T-pose all the time in cyberpunk, that was a bug that was horrible but obviously it was tracked somewhere, and some director was like “it’s fine, ship it”
There was a Dead or Alive game in which a manager literally released it before it was ready without consulting with the team. The game was still in beta and a glitchy mess.
The PS2 version of DoA2? I vaguely recall reading about it, also how the Dreamcast version turned out to be the complete one.
Now i complain about both the bugs in my games and the bugs in other games
Wrong.
I start to appreciate games that implement complex and sometimes rarely noticeable (immersive, boo) mechanics that come off naturally. And I notice how a thought pattern behind bad ones could’ve progressed.
Bugs? My favs are buggy to the point some of these bugs became their own mechanics. I only get annoyed when the game bores me out, and if bugs can’t make me feel like it, it’s fine. And some better-done games are pretty boring to me.
Put four pots over the squares over the ground.
Shoot the dragon head statues, the pedestals raise.
The pedestals make stone grinding sounds and…
Only one pedestal has raised, the pots have caused the animation to bug out and the game engine to assume that the pedestal is in the final position on the floor.
The floor position has the lever locked.
The game developer never anticipated what a massive idiot I was
Bugs? My favs are buggy to the point some of these bugs became their own mechanics
This is pretty much half of competitive Brood War.
That’s the spirit.
Dying to a stupid bug is a great way to suddenly get frustrated though. Hard agree with you though, buggy games are my favorite. Especially small indie projects because I you can find the great bugs.
Dying to a bug in indie game can be so hilarious some youtubers in niche game communities got their rep from doing compilations of these. Case in point: PhanracK of WH:VT2 fame: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGlWiMg3bUg
Have you got some like this to follow?
I don’t know any YouTubers other than “Let’s Game It Out”.
My fav game to speedrun is Neon Boost (free on Steam) because of several bugs I have found in the game. Otherwise a small boring indie platformer about rocket jumping is made fun (to me) through exploitation of its physics.
- Diagonal movement is faster (hold two adjacent directional keys). Sliding makes you even faster.
- Precise rocket jumps can receive more velocity than the developers intended, allowing you to skip many parts.
- You can touch the end of stage goal post from underneath the platform.
- You can wall jump off of the top of walls, allowing for many skips and time saves.
- You can get massive upwards velocity by sliding into a small couple-pixel ridge and jumping precisely once you touch it. This is possible on the starting platforms of all World 1 levels. It basically only improves individual level speedrun records, except on one level where you can skip the whole level and complete it in 1 second (an 9x faster than intended.
My crowning achievement was completing the final level of World 1 (1-12) in 18 seconds. The Devs expected a fastest time around 40 sec.
Learn to code and you’ll wonder how in the hell some bugs even got created
That’s not true - I’m complaining about the bugs in our software almost every day!
My favorite part is guessing what they do that results in the bug!
Right?? That’s one of my favorite aspects, like there’s a weird bug and you can kind of backtrack what happened like “Oh I wasn’t supposed to jump out of the car I had to walk through the precise path, I missed the trigger or something I guess??”
Understanding how software is made, and what are best software engineering practices to make stable software only makes hate AAA studios that release overpriced crashy messes even more.
Lies
learn to code and you’ll forever more be going “i could probably fix this if i could be fucked to get familiar with the codebase”
Nah I just changed from “these game devs” to “these game studios”
Instead they’ll become curiosities leading down rabbit holes to understand why and how they happened.
As someone who had a career as a web developer and had to build sites that worked pixel perfect on multiple devices and clients I think game developers are jokers