Finishing Touches
Bug off
The final step in producing a PopCap game is finding and fixing bugs — technical glitches or logical errors that interfere with game play. At PopCap, a quality gameplay experience is tantamount, and a bug-free game is simply more fun to play.
PopCap's Quality Assurance team (QA) is responsible for testing games to make sure bugs are squashed and that the games are ready to be released to the public. In short, they find the bugs and also suggest possible solutions. And no matter what the bug — from misspelled text to a clunky action sequence — the PopCap team is happy to fix it, so that everything is as perfect as possible!
For Peggle, the entire QA staff searched for bugs, Eric fixed them, QA retested a new version and unearthed other bugs, and Eric did more fixes. They did this over and over again until the bug sightings finally tapered off.
Most of the bugs were about things that didn't line up or function properly — the things that, if ignored, can keep a good game from being great. For instance, here are a few bug reports that came in:
- The pegs around one of the bat's eyes on the level "Baseball" don't line up properly. view
- The game goes numb when you press the F10 button.
- Images are missing on page six of the How to Play screen. view
QA found pretty much every bug possible — which didn't really surprise anyone. "We have probably the best QA department I've ever seen," Eric brags. "They really are game experts. They find all those little things that no one else thinks of." Who else would think to press F10 and try fast-forwarding with the right-mouse button at the same time to see if the game keels over? (It did.)
And when things are getting down to the wire and you have a virtually bug-free game, you know you've got a good thing going.
