Game Development by Ben Sizer

Every game in development has bugs!

In any complex game there are often hundreds of settings and values which influence the way the game plays.

The release of Cyberpunk 2077 in a poor state last year led to a lot of debate on how game development projects should be managed. Staff were overworked, deadlines were missed, features were cut, and the game came out with serious bugs.

Our server went down for no apparent reason. Turns out that it ran out of memory. Luckily we had a core dump and thus a useful stack trace with relevant parameters intact.

Back in March it was reported that Obsidian Entertainment missed out on a bonus payment from their publisher Bethesda when their game *Fallout: New Vegas* narrowly failed to score 85 points on the Metacritic scoring system, which aggregates game...

Something interesting happened today. For a couple of years, myself and colleagues had mulled over a certain 'killer feature' that we wished our networking layer had, as it would have made our time implementing gameplay features much easier.

I recently made a post on this issue over at Gamedev.net, and thought I'd clean it up a bit to post over here, as I think it's worth talking about.

Apologies in advance for the length of this entry; there's a short summary in the last paragraph if you're pressed for time!