This is what the video game equivalent of copyediting looks like.

The Morning News https://ift.tt/2JggRfl

Writing for a video game for the first time, novelist Robin Sloan discovers how bugs get worked out ahead of time.

Now that @neocabgame is out, I can post some behind the scenes stuff! Here are two of our testbots, running 18 instances of Neo Cab at 5x speed. For every clock hour we get 90 hours of gameplay testing. That is nearly a month of gameplay every 8 hours. #alwaysBeTesting pic.twitter.com/QAZcffP2FC

— Mighty Ben Britten (@benbritten) October 4, 2019

As Sloan puts it:

Publishing code is very different from publishing other kinds of media. With words, music, and moving images, there can be all sorts of drama behind the scenes—a tortuous editing process, a bizarre hack to create some visual effect—but once you have the finished product in hand, you know what you have. When a reader or a viewer decides to give it a try, the media will, with certainty, "work."

But that’s not the case with code! Even the simplest video game is a fiendishly complicated knot of logic. And even when its programmers are clever and cautious, there are bound to be bugs lurking in the depths, just waiting for a player to, for example, press A and B together on the keypad while their character holds a torch and looks straight up—a combination which, because it was never accounted for, suddenly causes the whole world to go black...

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