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Testers work to find bugs in Black & White. |
"There's nothing like celebrating the New Year with a list of 3,000 bugs," jokes Molyneux. With the team well rested from a week off, the task at hand in the New Year was to clean up the game for release. Hitting alpha was a major milestone, and now there was no question that the game was within a few months of being completed. "When we came back, Peter just said, 'Creativity off, guys. We have to finish this game,'" recalls Barnes.
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Programmer Dan Deptford tries to get a few hours of shut-eye. |
The brunt of the work was given to the game programmers, who had to squash bugs that ranged from those that completely crashed the program to those that simply prevented the player from moving forward with the story. The rest of the team was on call to help out, but most of the art and music had already been completed. "We're sort of like doctors on call," explains Alex Evans. "We serve in a supporting role."
Internally, the top-secret goal was to finish Black & White on February 16, which gave the team about six weeks to clear all the bugs. By January 26, things seemed to be going according to schedule: The bug database was down to 387 remaining issues with the game. As the team moved into February, the real pressure started to mount. "They had been working 24-hour shifts," says Jayne Webley, "coming home for three or four hours' sleep and then going straight back to work."
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Ollie Purkiss and Jean-Claude Cottier discuss a bug. |
With so many complicated systems working together inside the game environment, fixing bugs is easier said than done. "Finishing this game is like putting those final cards on a house of cards--you don't want to knock the whole thing down, so you do it very carefully," says Purkiss as he looks at a line chart on a white board representing the number of bugs left in the game, titled "Crashing Toward Zero."
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Tim Rance and another Lionhead employee discuss how to solve a multiplayer crash. |
To further motivate the team, Molyneux booked a nice restaurant in London for Friday, February 16, the target gold date for the game. As the team celebrated the third anniversary of the game's development on February 14, there were still dozens of obscure bugs to squash in the next two days. As is always the case, the final few bugs prove the most elusive.
On the night of February 15, things looked grim: There were too many bugs left, and it looked like the team would be unable to cut the master. Molyneux was crestfallen; he knew he was going to have to miss his Games Night for the first time ever
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Molyneux looks at the clock and can't believe he's going to miss Games Night. |
because the game wouldn't be finished. "I called up Ian and hoped to be there by 9 o'clock," explains Molyneux, "but I never did make it to Games Night because we didn't finish the game in time. Believe me, I've had to pay for that horribly, because Ian is a complete bastard. I've had to buy them all dinner and read countless game rules." In addition, Molyneux had already bought his lift ticket for a vacation to the slopes of St. Anton for the following week. With the game missing February 16 by a hair, plans had to be changed: The team dinner in London was canceled, and Molyneux's vacation to St. Anton was called off.
But all was not lost. The team set a new target: February 23, one week later. With so few bugs remaining, the team felt seven days was enough to clear up the remaining issues. Still, the pressure was mounting, because if the gold date had to be further delayed, Black & White would risk slipping to April.
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