Nearly a week ago, Steve Gaynor, co-founder of the influential indie studio Fullbright, posted a tweet asking developers to post their “most embarrassing game dev crimes.” No, he wasn’t talking about stealing office supplies or abusing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. He was talking about the kind of foundational misunderstandings or professional inadequacies that crop up when you’re trying to get a game finished and out the door.
In video games, just as in most professions, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Some just require a little more brute force than others. Meanwhile, some workarounds are simply hilarious.
To start the conversation, Gaynor offered his own wacky faux pas about scripting the logic in video games. The technical aspects of the tweet aren’t important. What is important is the fact that even the best in the business are learning new solutions to problems all the time.
Five days and more than 4,900 retweets later, the thread has begun to truly blossom. Secretive as the games industry is, developers are always sharing with each other. This week, they’ve been sharing laughs. Here’s a selection of the choicest bits.
From Raph Koster, lead designer of Ultima Online:
Christmas trees on Ultima Online. We didn’t have art for them, so I attached a script to a generic pine that spawned the little colored gemstones we did have and vertically offset them. Then they each had a script with periodic callbacks to appear and vanish, so they twinkled.
— Raph Koster (@raphkoster) December 16, 2018
Then we gave one Xmas tree to every player who logged in. Thousands of trees each with twenty callbacks on approx one second intervals. The message queue overloaded on every server and crashed the entire service. On Christmas. I had the week off.
— Raph Koster (@raphkoster) December 16, 2018
From Jake Rodkin, whose work includes the Monkey Island series, Sam and Max, and Telltale’s The Walking Dead:
the final scene for the final TTG Sam & Max game can never be changed, because I baked the lights in Maya, exported the lightmaps to the game engine, checked it in, then slammed every program on my PC shut because we were supposed to be locked hours ago. never saved the Maya file
— Jake Rodkin (@ja2ke) December 16, 2018
From Scott Benson, co-creator of Night In The Woods, his very first video game:
a *big* chunk of art in NITW is made out of a handful of white sprites (square/circle/triangle, with solid & alpha ramp versions) all placed and scaled and rotated and tinted one by one by one. Just piles of them, at times hundreds per scene, entire environments made of them, etc
— Xmas Wrapping #1 Jam (@bombsfall) December 16, 2018
From BioWare’s Mark Darrah, executive producer on the Dragon Age series and the upcoming Anthem:
Baldur’s Gate 1 shipped in debug mode because it crashed in any other compile target (uninitialized memory)
— Mark Darrah (@BioMarkDarrah) December 15, 2018
In an early Vlambeer game, positioning a boss unit on a roof of a (awfully coded) generated building was done by dropping it from above the roof at a random position, and teleporting it back up if it fell below the roof.
— Rami Ismail (@tha_rami) December 16, 2018
If you went fast & got lucky, you could catch it falling.
From video editor and artist Duncan Robson:
One of this character's cutscenes in Colony Wars III: Red Sun has my facial capture performance because I deleted a file and was too scared to tell anyone pic.twitter.com/1XjkgySOYe
— Duncan Robson (@dunkr) December 16, 2018
Also we all used a lot of curses in our tags in the editor so weeks before shipping @TimSweeneyEpic got freaked out bout em all and wrote a script file to filter em all and replace em.
— Cliff Bleszinski (@therealcliffyb) December 18, 2018
From Jason Scott, who now works for the Internet Archive:
We had a prototype game we were demoing, and enemy code was simple but we had added more code to make it smoother/varied. One day an enemy turned, flew away. And flew. And flew. Became a dot. We waited to see what would happen.
— Jason Scott (@textfiles) December 16, 2018
An hour later, it left memory and crashed the box.
Finally, my personal favorite comes from Jim Hejl, a veteran of the Madden series who currently works at Electronic Arts:
On Madden 2003, we had a bug where all the players vanished.
— Jim Hejl (@jimhejl) December 18, 2018
Just a stadium, a field, and a ball at midfield.
A Jr coder named James said:
“Did you check inside the ball?”
Smirking, we checked w/ the debug cam. AND THERE THEY WERE.
Tiny players, in formation, in the ball.