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[ElyrionX]

So, the creators of Penny Arcade and PvP have collaborated and created this new webcomic called The Trenches.

Its been a long time coming but we have finally launched our new comic The Trenches. This comic is a collaboration between Tycho and I along with Scott Kurtz. Scott and I created the the characters and the look of the strip and he is handling the artwork for the actual comics. The three of us are writing it together and having a blast. The Trenches is much different from Penny Arcade in that it is has what the ladies call “continuity”.

The Trenches focuses on Isaac and his life as a game tester. As the comic goes on you’ll get introduced to his friends and the hell that can be QA. The comic will be updated every Tuesday and Thursday. Along with each new strip we will also be featuring a story from an actual tester about their experiences in the industry. So if you have your own horror story that you’d like to share (anonymously of course) you can hit this page and get it off your chest.

Its been awesome working with Scott on this project and I could not be more proud of the final result. I know it’s early but I promise we’ve got a lot of great characters and fun stuff planned. I hope you’ll keep checking in with The Trenches on Tuesdays and Thursdays as we introduce you to this world we’ve had so much fun building.

It just got started two weeks ago so the story and characters are still being fleshed out. Only four strips so far:

Somewhat more interestingly, the site features anecdotes from real-life game testers (supposedly) in a section called Tales from the Trenches. It makes for pretty interesting reading:

Man of the Match

I remember very clearly the first game I ever tested. Ken Griffey, Jr’s Winning Run for the SNES. America’s pastime being developed by a UK developer (they couldn’t figure out why the MVP of the game wasn’t called the “Man of the Match”).

But what I remember the most is learning how different testing was compared to playing a game. I don’t normally sit down to a baseball game and play a tie game to 99 innings to see if the game will freak out when it hits 100. I don’t normally sit down at a video game with a scorer’s book and chart the pitches of the CPU pitchers to make sure they are throwing the correct ones.

This was not “getting paid to play games” – this was “getting paid to perform monotonous, time consuming, mind numbing activities.” This was sit at your desk and try to hit a home run that barely crosses the top of the fence just a little right of the footage marker in center field of the Kingdome because three builds ago the sprite of the center fielder that jumped up to catch the ball warped through the wall and disappeared off screen… oh, and this only happens in the bottom of the fifth inning. Does it take you two hours to recreate? Four hours? Three days? It doesn’t matter – doing it is your task.

You learn to hate every game you test (with some small exceptions). You go to sleep thinking about them, wake up thinking about them and even dream about them. Hours spent in a small windowless room with little ventilation.

Trapped.

But in the end, it’s all worth it. Actually, no wait – it wasn’t. That bug you spent the last week trying to track down just got waived as a feature.

Anything Goes

I worked on a AAA title a few years ago, and our schedule started as 40 hours a week, Monday through Friday. Then they told us the game was going to need a “little” bit of crunch, and those of us who “stuck it out” and “stepped up” and “paid our dues” would be sure to end up as test leads on future projects, maybe even on the production fast track.

So we went to working 9 AM to 9 PM, Monday through Thursday and 9 AM to 5 PM on Fridays and Saturday. We did this 64 hour workweek for two months.

Then they upped our schedule to 9 AM to midnight Monday through Friday and 9 AM to 9 PM on Saturday. 87 hours a week for four straight months.

With crunch hitting, they added to our schedule AGAIN to 9 AM to midnight Monday through Saturday, with an “anything goes” warning. I ended up working 19 hour days, 7 AM to 2 AM, six days a week for the last six weeks of the project.

After the game shipped they laid me off.

The Clenched Fist

Placed through an online professional network, the employer gave me the location and details on the phone. I was to test for one week, and test one specific feature. Travel expenses were not paid, naturally. I would find out the rest when I got there.

The place was a barn. Not a large storehouse, room, basement or warehouse. A real barn, red with a large door. Like in a cartoon. As it turns out, the owner’s horses were killed a few months back by Gypsies, and he was leasing the barn for various purposes. One weekend it was a rave. The next a wake. This month, it was this little studio that needed a test facility.

They brought in plywood sheets for desks, 15” CRT monitors, garden chairs and a metal barrel of lemonade from the owner’s wife. You did your private stuff out back, or if you had to drop a deuce, there were two porta-potties out front. Not once were they cleaned during my contract. To this day, my bowels make a clenched fist and punch me from the inside when I think of that period, for they were kept full.

My job was to test a new kind of engine that would sometimes overlap textures abnormally when the player jumped. So in essence, my “character” was placed in a large windowless building with hallways and told to jump over and over.

For one week, I did nothing but jump and look at texture seams, eat sandwiches and drink lemonade, never shitting, stuck in an infinite loop of sadness and misery with my in-game character.

So those anecdotes above are all well and good but check out this doozy:

Ship It

Suppose you found a bug in a game that rendered a console unplayable? Suppose it was something akin to the original Myth II Uninstall problem where it basically formatted your hard drive, only worse?

There was a game that was released in the last 10 years that had a peculiar issue toward the end where you could crash the title just before one of the end bosses by doing a manual save just as it was autosaving.

If you did, it caused the console kernel to overwrite itself, rendering the entire unit non-functional.

After causing this to happen once, I was asked to replicate the issue in front of people who made a lot more money than I did. After sixteen hours of play, I, again, saved while the game was autosaving, and watched with everyone else in the room as the screen turned black and the console shut down. Attempting to boot it up didn’t even result in an error screen, it would just power on and then shut back down.

(To me) “You can do this every time?”
“If I want to, yeah.”
(To a marketing guy) “How long until we’re supposed to ship?”
“We’re supposed to go gold in a week.”
(To a developer) “How long would this take to fix?”
“We’ll have to rewrite the entire file structure. Weeks, at least. Probably months.”

The game shipped.

I got fired.

I wonder if GAF can figure out which game it is.

 

[MrDaravon]

So those anecdotes above are all well and good but check out this doozy:



I wonder if GAF can figure out which game it is.

Hooooooly shit. Someone get Patrick Klepek on this!

 

[Mr. B Natural]

So far so good. Little been there done that, but it's done well. Seems like I'll like this until it starts talking about the video game industry/game testing.

 

[snoopeasystreet]

Some portuguese boardgame guy is going to be pissed about the name.

 

[Atomski]

Some portuguese boardgame guy is going to be pissed about the name.

Haha I figured this was in some way related..

 

[LiK]

Rename this Steel Squad.

 

[TheOddOne]

Rename this Steel Squad.

I wanted to make this joke, dammit.

 

[MarshMellow96]

I'm in Europe, can I read it without having to get a US account?

 

[Rad-]

Would read but I'm from Europe.

 

[SkinnyPupp]

I really like PA, but so far these aren't funny or interesting or even a little bit amusing. OK the stories are somewhat amusing, but the comics suck.

 

[EmCeeGramr]

These stories are incredibly interesting. The comic... well it's still in the early stages, so it might be alright, but these stories are really revealing.

Nothing to lose.
08/23/2011

I was part of a group working on a big QA project and was lucky enough to have a friend working on that same team. On the way to a Halloween party, our boss called him and explained that this big, important title we had been working on for a year had been cancelled and that, unfortunately, he was no longer needed.

I remember at the time thinking this didn’t make a lot of sense given the size of the project, but with this new information in hand, the plan of a mellow, mid-week costume party turned into an all-night bender commiserating with my fellow unemployed friend.

In the morning, blurry eyed, I realized I had left some personal effects in my cubical and decided to head in to get my stuff. When I stumbled into the lab, still aching from the previous night’s debauchery, I found everyone hard at work. Indeed, when I asked “Aren’t we cancelled?” all I got in return were weird looks. The only one missing from the team was my friend.

Oops.

Secrets.
08/25/2011

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of doing some temp work for a firm that contracted out to a pretty big game developer. The testing staff was us contractors and maybe five, six full-time employees- that way the company didn’t have to pay a large testing staff if they didn’t need to.

About two weeks into my assignment, I learned just how draconian NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) can be.

I had gotten to know some of the other employees pretty well- including a soft spoken girl named Annie who sat in the cube next to mine. Like all of us there, she was really excited about working at this particular company. On this particular day, we had been working on an RPG, and all of us had been stumped by a specific puzzle in the game.

We had just come back from lunch and were settling back into our cubicles, when suddenly, Brian, our main testing supervisor, steps into our row accompanied by a pair of the largest men I had ever seen. They were security guards- the ones that I usually saw in the mornings as I walked in the door. Quietly I noticed him tap on Annie’s shoulder. She looked up and took off her headphones.

“Hey, Annie?” Brian quietly muttered.
“Hey, what can I do for you?” she asked.
“Uh, there’s a problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, here’s the the thing. You violated your confidentiality agreement. You’ll need to vacate the building immediately.”
“Wait, what? I… what are you talking about?”
“At lunch today you were discussing aspects of one of the games you were testing to another employee. Annie, I-”
“I am so sorry, I had no idea that I wasn’t allowed to-”
“You need to leave the building. Now.”

The girl was led out of the building by the guards in tears, and the rest of us just sat there, mouths agape.

Blood, Sweat, and Tears
08/30/2011

I spent 4 years with an electronic refurbishing company with the majority of that time spent on video game consoles. A number of you reading this may actually own a console that we repaired, because over those four years we were able to sell hundreds of thousands of units.

But here’s the thing. The company was profitable because of people like me. Guys who were willing to pull over time off the clock to make shipping deadlines. Guys who kept silent when they were promised a raise every few months, but never saw a penny. We may have made more than minimum wage, but not by much. We had student loans to pay, families to provide for and kids on the way. Many employees moved in together because they couldn’t make rent or house payments on their own.

Management didn’t understand the gaming industry. They came from manufacturing backgrounds and saw dollar signs, but they didn’t know the ebb and flow like the employees did. Instead of listening to feedback, they ran the company into the ground and laid everyone off twice a year. Each time, less and less people came back.

I got lucky. I was a department head and almost untouchable. As was my wife. They needed both of us to keep our departments running, but this last lay off, we went with everyone else.

The company was full of OSHA violations and was miserable to work in. The air conditioning frequently failed because it’s old and can’t handle the space, so we frequently worked in a warehouse that was simply dangerous to our health. During the winter, the heat couldn’t keep the place warm enough so we’d end up wearing several pairs of jeans, two hoodies, and jackets while struggling to fix handheld devices in winter gloves.

But we kept coming in because they promised “it’ll get better.” We laughed and joked about it, but it didn’t matter because we loved what we did. We loved the products. We were taken for granted, and treated as less then human.

I’m not from China, or Taiwan, or another country you would expect these conditions in. I’m from the Midwest. The United States of America. If you bought a refurbished product at any major U.S. retailers, that’s a console I bled for. Check for that warranty sticker on the back. It’s one of ours. It’s a console that one of my friends, covered in sweat, worked on in 110 degree temperatures in the middle of July just before being laid off.

Respect that console. We gave everything we had every day to bring that to you.

Holy shit.

Like, you hear the horror stories about the mind-numbing "work," and how the QA testers get ignored half the time because someone decided that that bug's now a feature, but this is just crazy.

 

[TestMonkey]

Meh. I've been in QA for seven plus years now and none of the stories so far are shocking. The refurbishing plant was new but shitty factory conditions in a Midwest company in this economy is hardly shocking. I worked 85 hours last week bring it!

Any body else willing to admit to experience in the field?