The White Board: Murphy's Law and My SGP Experience

"Anything that can go wrong will go wrong".
- Murphy's law

How odd that this saying becomes a law when you start working in a creative industry like Video Games. For the last month, I've been plagues with certain establishments over charging my credit card, bills not getting paid because my money had up and left my account, and just today my electric was cut off temporarily because of certain personal issues back home. How does this relate to video games and the development cycle? Easy, prior to heading into my five month final game project I had little to no issues in this area. This "law" plays an intensified effect on the programmers in this industry especially. ANYTHING, could go wrong when programming for a game and if the proper steps aren't taken to avoid these issues ahead of time then ANYTHING and EVERYTHING WILL go wrong.

I speak from experience in this area, during a three day crunch before "gold" turn in for my two month Structure of Game Production (SGP) class EVERYTHING went wrong. Entire features got cut, downsized, or down right re-written. It's like a train loosing control and shooting towards the end destination. We didn't crash horribly but we crashed. We burned our gold disc on the ride to our expo and finished burning the disc as we pulled up to the entrance. I slapped the disc in it's case and SPRINTED towards the door. As I got to the door and opened it Keyvan our instructor grabbed the disc from my hand and escorted me in. Talk about cutting it close, we were technically late but we were hoping our sacrifices in sleep and time would make up with our finished product.

Remember Murphy's law? Well when you cut, reconstruct, and re-integrate full features into a game with no time to test them it comes back to bite you. Our game had crashes in certain section due to some hacking and assets being re-written during our final integration. When the bat enemies attacked and hit you it would sometimes cause the game to crash due to a subscript out of range error. It was slightly embarressing to have our game collapse on some people due to this. Also, our menu system was re-designed the night before and because of this certain features weren't implemented and sometimes it would lock up on the player.

Luckily our game had a very good amount of content and polished aspects to it that we were able to stay afloat from the wreckage and come out with knowledge if nothing else. I think myself, Kai Ting, Ercan, and David all came out of that experience a little wiser and sadly slightly bitter. We now know, fear, and treat the development cycle with respect. This may cause us to come off as strict or picky within certain aspects but it's because we've been bitten by the development cycle and are trying to prevent those events from unfolding again.

NOTE: One thing I am really proud of is how close our game is to our concept art.

Here's some photos from our game Tainted Ink:
CONCEPT IMAGES: