The original Quest for Glory II took about a year to release
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Anonymous Game Creator 2
- The Prince of Shapeir
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- Joined: Tue May 08, 2001 4:12 am
- Location: Phobos
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Fixing that bug is easy, since it's just a matter of commenting out (or altering) a number. The time-consuming part is often identifying the cause of the bug and tracking it down. Since the game contains thousands of variables, and only one of them is usually responsible for causing the problem, it can take a while to narrow these things down.
After I played past day 15, I recalled that Aziza was supposed to summon the hero to her house before he departs for Raseir, however she hadn't done this in my game. So I started backtracking to find the exact moment in the game where the incorrect value was being set, which was causing Shameen not bark about Aziza.
Fortunately, this bug took only 10 minutes or so to identify. I would not say it was particularly difficult to track down. On the other hand, if I wasn't alert and hadn't recalled that Aziza was supposed to summon the hero until after playing much further in the game, this would have increased the amount of backtracking involved, and also the amount of time required to find and fix the bug.
When you consider that the entire list consists of 100's of similar entries, you can see how it's not really the difficulty of the bugs, but rather the sheer number of them which slows things down. We keep finding new issues every day, so the to-do list hasn't shrunk down to a manageable enough size yet. I think doing a complete play-through was a good thing, though. Prior to that, I was unaware how stable or buggy the game was as a whole. Now that I have a good idea of exactly what kind of bugs exist and how many there are, it's just a matter of fixing them all. After that, for the first time, I'll actually have a good idea of how stable the entire game is. We have to be sure that it won't be crashing fatally all over the place for beta testers, because if they can't even finish it, then we'd just have to keep uploading new beta versions which would also be time consuming and just pointless.
After I played past day 15, I recalled that Aziza was supposed to summon the hero to her house before he departs for Raseir, however she hadn't done this in my game. So I started backtracking to find the exact moment in the game where the incorrect value was being set, which was causing Shameen not bark about Aziza.
Fortunately, this bug took only 10 minutes or so to identify. I would not say it was particularly difficult to track down. On the other hand, if I wasn't alert and hadn't recalled that Aziza was supposed to summon the hero until after playing much further in the game, this would have increased the amount of backtracking involved, and also the amount of time required to find and fix the bug.
When you consider that the entire list consists of 100's of similar entries, you can see how it's not really the difficulty of the bugs, but rather the sheer number of them which slows things down. We keep finding new issues every day, so the to-do list hasn't shrunk down to a manageable enough size yet. I think doing a complete play-through was a good thing, though. Prior to that, I was unaware how stable or buggy the game was as a whole. Now that I have a good idea of exactly what kind of bugs exist and how many there are, it's just a matter of fixing them all. After that, for the first time, I'll actually have a good idea of how stable the entire game is. We have to be sure that it won't be crashing fatally all over the place for beta testers, because if they can't even finish it, then we'd just have to keep uploading new beta versions which would also be time consuming and just pointless.
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Anonymous Game Creator 2
- The Prince of Shapeir
- Posts: 8891
- Joined: Tue May 08, 2001 4:12 am
- Location: Phobos
- Contact:
When we release it to the public? Hell, the time I got sick of playing through it was probably about five years ago! 
Like I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, when play-testing for comparison's sake between the SCI version and our remake, I don't play through the entire game. I have a bunch of pre-saved games from the SCI version and I also rely on the Suck Blue Frog debug codes to jump around places in the SCI game (how thoughtful of Sierra to include that for our benefit!).
I have played through all of the remake scenes individually countless times. I couldn't even say how many. It would be somewhere in the thousands. However, I've only played through the entire game from beginning to end once. I'll probably play through it 5 or 6 times in total before we release the public version.
While developing KQ2VGA, I learned that playing any game about 200+ times from beginning to end, REALLY becomes a chore. So after that I changed my strategy, I've decided not to play our games in development all the way through from start to finish until they are very near to the end of development. That way, I can still maintain a slight amount of interest while play-testing them -- enough to make the process slightly motivating and therefore faster to work on.
Funnily enough, I'm still discovering lines and puzzles in QFG2 that I didn't know existed. So that keeps things interesting and entertaining. This game is really huge. For example, recently, I thought that the Rusty Nail was an inventory item that had been removed from the SCI game before it shipped. But just yesterday, I found out that it actually is in the SCI version and it does have a use. It just shows up under very specific circumstances. So I scripted that puzzle in.
We're trying to make this remake as authentic to the original as possible, so that even die-hard fans will be very hard pressed to find any missing content. And if anything is missing, it'll be either because it didn't translate well to Point and Click or will be something very minor that we didn't know about (like the rusty nail thing mentioned above).
Though I must admit, this remake is probably the least tiresome to test of all the games we've worked on so far. The spells and combat scenes are just too much fun to get sick of.
Like I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, when play-testing for comparison's sake between the SCI version and our remake, I don't play through the entire game. I have a bunch of pre-saved games from the SCI version and I also rely on the Suck Blue Frog debug codes to jump around places in the SCI game (how thoughtful of Sierra to include that for our benefit!).
I have played through all of the remake scenes individually countless times. I couldn't even say how many. It would be somewhere in the thousands. However, I've only played through the entire game from beginning to end once. I'll probably play through it 5 or 6 times in total before we release the public version.
While developing KQ2VGA, I learned that playing any game about 200+ times from beginning to end, REALLY becomes a chore. So after that I changed my strategy, I've decided not to play our games in development all the way through from start to finish until they are very near to the end of development. That way, I can still maintain a slight amount of interest while play-testing them -- enough to make the process slightly motivating and therefore faster to work on.
Funnily enough, I'm still discovering lines and puzzles in QFG2 that I didn't know existed. So that keeps things interesting and entertaining. This game is really huge. For example, recently, I thought that the Rusty Nail was an inventory item that had been removed from the SCI game before it shipped. But just yesterday, I found out that it actually is in the SCI version and it does have a use. It just shows up under very specific circumstances. So I scripted that puzzle in.
We're trying to make this remake as authentic to the original as possible, so that even die-hard fans will be very hard pressed to find any missing content. And if anything is missing, it'll be either because it didn't translate well to Point and Click or will be something very minor that we didn't know about (like the rusty nail thing mentioned above).
Though I must admit, this remake is probably the least tiresome to test of all the games we've worked on so far. The spells and combat scenes are just too much fun to get sick of.
Hmm, now I'm trying to guess what the rusty nail is for...
[spoiler]Maybe it shows up in jail if the Thief doesn't get the Katta Pin before leaving Shapeir?[/spoiler]
[spoiler]Maybe it shows up in jail if the Thief doesn't get the Katta Pin before leaving Shapeir?[/spoiler]
Awesome.Anonymous Game Creator 2 wrote:Though I must admit, this remake is probably the least tiresome to test of all the games we've worked on so far. The spells and combat scenes are just too much fun to get sick of.