Five little words...

We're smack dab in the middle of the hazy days of summer. It's Monday and promising to be a hot one this week in the balmy Midwest. Which usually means mistakes will happen. In the process of making a game (or any venture where there's a lot of people working on the same thing) mistakes occur and it's up to folks in quality control to find those mistakes and bring them to our attention so we can fix them. It is often during this process that we see those five little words that we dread: "it would be nice if..." These words are usually followed by a suggestion that seems trivial on the surface, but threatens to trigger an avalanche of bugs and errors as programmers, artists and designers inadvertantly destroy the fragile house of cards that the rest of the game is resting on, all to attempt to satisfy the needs of a tester who, truth be told, probably wasn't all that adamant about the suggestion in the first place. And so it goes, the initial fix creating new bugs that need fixing, resulting in more error reports and more musings and suggestions and it's a wonder anything ever gets delivered on time at all. So if you're ever wondering why your favorite game still hasn't reached the store shelves after six months since it was promised, it's probably because of those five little words: "it would be nice if..."