Monday, September 22, 2008

Day Eight: More tests, more bugfixes

Posted by Nicolas (permalink)

A lot of people are currently asking us if they can play the game before the official launch, or even become one of our testers. But no, sorry, we really don't need a horde of playtesters to validate a mod that only last a few hours. Portal is somewhat logic, if someone is able to finish a test, we don't really care if there's one or more solutions. Of course we try to avoid tricks and stuff, but still, it's part of the game.

Here is a message I sent to a really skilled tester who wanted to test the game before the launch :

Although you seem to be a pretty good skilled tester, we don't need your help. Our goal is not to make the perfect game possible. Portal was rather good, but it had many flaws everywhere. Places where people could do tricks that seemed like cheating.

We need to have this kind of feeling, we need to be able to say "oh my god, I made this level myself and I never even though about this solution". We're only using "basic" testers, some of them are skilled, some aren't, and some of them didn't even really played Portal.

We also tested it on various configurations. I tested it myself on a dusty AMD 3000+, with a Radeon X1950 and on an Intel Core Duo with a Radeon X1600. Jéméry tested it on a Core 2 Duo 7100 with an NVidia 8400GT and Marc used an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 and a GeForce 8800 GT.
Don't take it too personnal, testers are only people in my direct friends.

Meanwhile, we're correcting stuff and changing a few details on the last level... Regarding the release date, nothing is really fixed for the moment, but the last test session is scheduled for this evening and we'll have a way better view of what's left to do.