Hahahoj said:
Thanks for that clarification. I will go now and tease Ziz and foxblock(... and everyone else who ported to consoles he or she doesn't have) how unprofessional they are.
I thought they did it to bring their work to a bigger audience...
Thanks for example. Schizophrenia at RIOT competition - it is a true example of professional work and the desire to sit on the all chairs at once.
In my opinion, professionalism - it does not wish to replicate work in all places where you can. It is responsible for final product quality. How can you guarantee the quality of debugging and testing for the console which you do not have?
Testing and debugging in this case turned into hell, and you can not be sure about the quality of the final product.
So why have the headache and much of the lost time, if much easier and more interesting make new project for those consoles that you have?
Well as I am addressed directly here, I guess I have to answer.
First of all, yes, the game was buggy as hell and also did not work on any of the console from the start - this is completely our fault and we apologized for it.
Now there is a reason for why it went that way. The reason is not because we tried to target all consoles and failed due to the ability of testing, but rather because we did not have time for testing.
You see, for several reasons the game was only finished in the last minutes, so besides PC versions we did not have time to send console versions out to people for testing.
Now, some time after the competition all ports work as well as the PC version does and in most cases it was just missing files or a wrong compiler parameter - it certainly was not any hardware or software limitation.
In fact, there are several reason why we targeted all consoles.
- Porting to all consoles involved was a piece of cake (that's not always true of course) - targeting all of them does not require much more work than targeting any subset of them
- We want the greatest target audience possible, not only because we wanted to win, but more importantly because we want as many people enjoying our game as possible - that is THE reason why we make games, so why exclude people for whatever stupid reason
- The spirit of this community and the competition is supposed to be "open", so we tried to reinforce that principle as much as possible by releasing our source code and releasing for all platforms. We want all communities to take part in our work and not alienate them.
Last but not least, both Ziz and I don't own ANY of the consoles involved in the compo, so going after some people's logic we should not have even tried to make a game, which is rather stupid in my eyes.
Testing obviously is a problem, but in our case it was merely based on time, nothing else. After we had the time to ship out ports to several people the bugs were quickly found and addressed. I worked like that before in a Pandora homebrew competition and it worked out better, because I had two very nice people to help me out debugging the game by running a few tests and playing it. It's always better to own the hardware yourself and do all testing yourself, but if you got some dedicated and knowledgeable testers, that's not really an issue.
Please take this as a post defending myself, not attacking AAAA or any of the developers, I just replied on the mention of my name.
Good day.
