Nightmares of Game Developers

Last night, I woke up in the middle of the night while having a terrible dream. I dreamt that the game-updater no longer worked. This meant I had no way to get fixes and improvements to my users. I couldn’t even give them a new updater that worked (*well, I could, but only if they tracked me down). I calmed myself down and managed to get back to sleep.

Today I had to get out a fix for a bug that wouldn’t let players load some of their saved-games. I put together a fix, and tried to put out an update. What happens? The game-updater no longer worked. With the recent change that allowed the game to use foreign character sets, I had inadvertently broke the updater. It took me two frantic hours to figure out what was going wrong, and I came up with a way to work around the updater bug. At least it wasn’t irrevocably broken.

Yup, these are the kinds of nightmares that software developers have.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

Please note: if your comment doesn't appear right away, it's probably because it was automatically put into the moderation queue.

(optional)