A Tale of Three Bugs
It’s a fact: bugs love me.
Flash-back, a couple of years ago. As part of the Gameloft porting drone army, I’ve got the task of getting AND1 Streetball work on a couple of Sprint phones. On the first look, the phones were decent, with plenty of package and memory and it seemed like an easy task. But nooo….
On phone #1, on very rare occasions, and only in the hand of the tester, the ballers displayed incompletely. Sometimes, they missed a hand. Or a thigh. Or even their head. The game audience was supposed to be teen, so having the Headless Horseman with a basket ball didn’t exactly fit. Needless to say, the first few times I dismissed the bug as DNR. Oh, how I loved “did not reproduce”: the only way a programmer could veto a pesky tester. But the tester wouldn’t give up and pictured the headless baller in action. After crunch time, a couple of sleepless nights and many packs of cigarettes later, it seemed that, for an unknown reason – technical talk ahead – the references body parts images magically became null like something in the Java VM erased them. Maybe the garbage collector decided he wanted to collect heads. The Jeffrey Dahmer GC.
I think I fixed the bug. In hindsight, I would have given a reference to an arm to see a player noticing a headless baller 😀
Phone #2, on even rarer occasions, decided that too much play hurts the brain and corrupted the entire screen.
The only thing that pops in my mind was the tester running from the far side of the working space, phone in hand, yelling “I’ve reproduced it!!!” Needless to say, it was the first and last time I saw the bug in action and eventually came up with a “blind” fix. Never, to this day, knew what caused the bug or if the phone (the only there was around to test on) was damaged.
Hop in the DeLorean, back to the future, time set “one day ago”. See myself working on a build of Born of Fire TD to release on Kongregate. Version built and uploaded. Messages received from angry players: “loading stucked at 80%”. Wait, what?!?
I have 5 browsers, 2 computers and a couple of stand-alone Flash players (those from the Flex SDK that are like from the time Noah built the Ark – anyway, old enough to ensure a valid test enviro). A couple of my friends (hello there!) also tested the game in perfect conditions. And yet, this bug slipped through the cracks, pass the day of release.
Do I have to say that I fixed the bug “in blind”? 🙂 Or should I say like a true Klingon programmer,
Our users will know fear and cower before our software. Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
Anyway, bugs love me.
I know for sure they will crawl again in my code.
