Friday 9 November
Just a few days till release date, and things are looking pretty good. Tuesday was the last big push to fix issues, and I know that I, and probably many others, were in the office 15+ hours that day. In theory all we're doing since then is fixing bugs, and in fact that theory is close to reality since we pushed so hard up to Tuesday getting things cleaned up. Since bugs are all we're doing, we are starting to be able to work slightly less long hours, which is a nice change. As things have been calming down a bit, we've been doing more play tests of various zones for some last minute tweaking of difficulty levels and identifying any bugs that might have come up. Fyreflyte took advantage of the extra time to decorate our office with Christmas lights, making it look very festive and cheerful. Cat, our audio lead, has been so enthused about the little slug that ended up on her desk that she persuaded me to show her how to make them, and since we actually were able to leave work by 7 last night, she and Fyreflyte came over to my place for pizza and cheesecake, and we watched the DVD of "Flushed Away" while making random slugs. It was a nice break from bug fixing all evening!
The majority of my bugs this week have been fairly non serious stuff, the kind of things that should be fixed of course, but aren't going to break anybody's game if they didn't get done in time for release. Things like having the wrong tint on some of the armor, or recipe names not exactly matching the item name. I also did a bit of tweaking of some of the crafted item stats, to make them a bit more desirable, and to address some of the concerns raised by the beta testers posting in the beta forums. There have been so many very helpful players taking the time to check all the items for their crafting classes and offer suggestions where things didn't make sense to them, and identifying bugs where they found them, it's been wonderful. Although in most cases QA catches the bugs also, things that aren't outright bugs but just inconsistencies aren't things that are necessarily readily apparent to someone who doesn't know that crafting class inside out, so this kind of feedback is extremely valuable and I have definitely appreciated everyone who took the time to do that.
Monday 12 November
Tomorrow's the big day; I was starting to think it would never arrive, but we've made it at last! The Rise of Kunark release, my very first expansion and the fourth expansion for EverQuest II. Of course, I've only seen the other three expansions as a player, not from the development side, but this one seems pretty solid to me and Gallenite has been telling us the same thing. Each day for the past week and a bit he's emailed around a graph showing how many bugs for the expansion are still open for the dev team and for QA, and every day that number has fallen dramatically, until at the start of this weekend we were down to two digits, and by today I imagine there were almost none at all. (Of course, many of the QA queue bugs might not be bugs any longer, just waiting to be tested and signed off.) I know that in my own bug queue there's been very little left for this expansion in the past few days, and mostly pretty minor things like spelling errors or inconsistencies in status reduction amounts in furniture, etc.
It being the weekend before release, we were all asked to come in on the weekend and ensure that any bugs that did come back from QA were promptly turned around. Normally we make changes and fix bugs and add things all day during the day, and then overnight an automatic process rebuilds stuff into a new version, which then goes to our internal servers in the morning so QA can test our changes on that. Over this weekend, however, we were turning over the builds much faster than usual, trying to get everything cleared up and tidied away. The dev team and coding team would fix their outstanding bugs, and then a new build would be run. This would take about 90 minutes to 2 hours and then QA would check out all the bugs we fixed, and either close them off or send them back. Then we would fix any bugs that got sent back (or, occasionally, new ones discovered) and once those were all checked in, another build, another round with QA, and so on. This went on for pretty much the whole weekend.
There was a lot of waiting around in between times while the builds were happening. Some people worked on new content for next month, some did play testing or chatted with players on the beta server, others who lived close went home in between. Since we're in really good shape regarding number and severity of bugs it wasn't overly stressful, mostly a lot of anticipating and waiting. I ended up going home during the build yesterday afternoon and baking some chocolate chip cookies to bring in today, which actually worked out pretty well for the folks who stayed late in the office, because when I had to go back in around 7pm last night to fix a bug that had come back, I was able to bring a batch of fresh baked, still-warm-from-the-oven cookies for the QA team and the remaining developers and coders to enjoy. The rest of the cookies came in today and were divided between QA, who have been doing such a fantastic job catching and checking stuff I'd missed, and the dev and code teams, who have also been working flat out of course.
