Fresh Eyes and Playing Differently

I had the good fortune to have been picked as the lead tester at 3do for the "Heroes of Might and Magic IV" series. On this day however "Heroes" was not in test so I had my first look at "Cubix Robots for Everyone: Showdown".

This was a GameCube game based on a CGI cartoon show. There was some thought that Cubix might be the "next Pokémon". It had many of the elements that one would want in a "next Pokémon". Young heroes that solved conflicts with their robots that they collected and customized. In addition, since the show was done in CGI, we were able to use actual assets from the show.

Cubix had been in test for quite some time and no new bugs had been found lately. The game featured both single and multi-player modes, as well as a number of puzzles and mini-games.

The first puzzle of the game, a simple one used to teach the player the game mechanics, was pushing and stacking four boxes in the family garage so that the van could be moved in. The game had two camera positions. A 3/4 isometric view and an overhead view used mostly for some of the jumping puzzles later in the game. Since this puzzle took place in a garage with a low ceiling, using the overhead view made no sense, so naturally that is the view I chose.



As I pushed the first box into place something in the stack of open boxes, to the left of the opening the puzzle boxes needed to be placed in, caught my eye. Through the open top of the top box I could see a double stack of "Business Life" magazines. I jumped on the web and Googled "Business Life" and sure enough the graphics people had used the actual covers of real magazines. The actual covers of real magazines without getting permission.

This is of course an "A" bug. A "stopper". Should the folks at "Business Life" find their magazine used in a game without their permission they could demand, for example, that all games not yet sold be recalled and "fixed". The cost of a recall like that would ensure that the game would never turn a profit and would likely end up being a major financial loss.

What can we learn from this? Well, from time to time, during a game's development cycle, it is good to bring in some fresh testers. Testers that have not yet seen the game. Fresh eyes that are not used to a game and can see it in ways that the testers so familiar with the game might not. In addition, we testers need to be able think differently, play differently. Approach a game and its goals from unique and different viewpoints. This will often turn up the bugs that might otherwise go unnoticed.

The Glove

This occurred back in the days when I was a lead tester at 3do. I had been assigned to do a playthrough on one of the many "Army Men" games. This one was on one of the Nintendo Gameboy handhelds and had just been translated into German and the text had been OK'd by our Localization Testers. I needed to go through it to make sure that the language change had not messed up anything in the play of the game and that it met all the specific standards that games for Germany had to meet (no blood for example).

I had just completed a level and was about to start the next when something struck me as odd. The title of the level I had just competed was "Handschuh". Remembering the small bit of German I had learned in High School I knew this was the German word for "glove" but thinking back through the level I didn't recall seeing any gloves.

The Army Man games were about toy soldiers (tan and green) at war in both their world and ours. When they were in our world (where this level was set) things (like gloves) were giant sized to them. I quickly played through the level again and confirmed that there were no gloves.

The bulk of the level consisted of two long lines of enemy (tan in this case) soldiers behind limited cover facing inward along a central open area that the player's soldier (green) has to traverse. Suddenly I realized what had happened and to explain I need to digress for a bit.

In the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, on the sailing ships on the Royal Navy, the ships, rigging and other gear, the officers and sailors were all considered the property of The Crown. Any criminal acts on any of those was a crime against The Crown and was met with dire punishments. The one exception to this royal ownership was in the few small possessions that the sailors were allowed to have on board.

A crime committed on a sailor's property was not a crime against The Crown and so not subject to the same harsh penalties. Still, a crime was a crime and as such it should not go unpunished. The aggrieved sailor would gather his friends together. They would grab knotted ropes, belaying pins and other such items that were deemed non-fatal and form two parallel lines. The sailor that committed the crime would then be compelled to run the length of the two lines whilst the sailors in those lines would give him as good a shot as they could manage. This came to be called "running the gauntlet".

Now the word "gauntlet" has other uses, most of which are some form of glove. Clearly, what had happened is that the original English title of the level had been "The Gauntlet" but the person or software used to translate that title used the other meaning of gauntlet and so arrived with a title that would be "The Glove".

I ran the above past the German localization tester and he agreed that that is what had happened and I wrote up the bug and it was fixed for the final release.

There are some useful lessons we can take from these events. Testers are not simply bleary eyed kids with twitchy thumbs. Intelligence and a broad educational background can give one a base against which to gauge when something is off and help to corner just what needs correcting. When something seems off it is often worth taking a few moments to consider just what it is and whether it needs a deeper looking into.