Post Process

“Making the game is easy, supporting it is hard” - Matt Brand.

That was the first real lesson we learned right as we launched Loc on April 4^th 2012. This past week the message got driven home.

After walking away on Thursday we all felt very confident about being able to launch Loc on Friday, we just had a few more things to look over. No big deal, we thought 1.1 was in the bag. So what went so horribly wrong that the game ended up shipping at nearly the end of the work day?

Well, a few things….

Typo’s

Even after I read over all of the text, I don’t know how many times, and after handing it off to an outside editor we still had little typo’s. Marguerite spent the morning reformatting and correcting the Achievement texts.

Screen Resolution

This was a nightmare, plain and simple. We knew from the beginning that we didn’t have the manpower or knowledge to try to tackle dynamically resizing the screen so that people could choose their own. We would have had to test on every single one of those available resolutions and ensure that no part of the game was clipped from the screen.

So what broke for us on Friday was that somehow our saved player preferences got corrupted. When we were building out the game we discovered that it was somehow filling the screen, but defaulting to a huge resolution which clipped almost half the game off screen, making it unplayable. However, this was only happening on Macs… We ended up scrubbing the player preferences and rebuilding them to finally get it working.

Saving

How to correctly import a players old save data into the new game. That was the challenge. Originally when we shipped the game, everyone’s save file was stored as an encrypted (just a simple binary) text file. This file tended to change locations depending on OS. 7 stored it in the temp folder, XP saved it in the game folder, and Macs saved it within the .App. What Matt and Mike learned since then was that we could safely save all of that data not in a text file, but as a record in the OS registry! This was a great fix as it solved all of our worries about having the save be in different places for everyone.

However, we needed to change everyone over to this new method. Matt ended up writing a script which parses the text file, saves it to the registry and deletes the text file. My job then was to ensure that the .exe file I created would overwrite the original loc game.

It was a little stressful at the end of the day, but we pulled it off. We apologies for the delay to everyone who has already purchased the game, you will be receiving a link/coupon to redeem the new version of the game.