Wednesday, September 14, 2016

Gyakuten Saiban 2 Blog Entry 7: Combing for Bugs (2002)

Title: Combing for Bugs / 「しらみつぶし」
Source: Gyakuten Saiban 2 official site (down)

Summary: Story, character and art design are by the topics most often discussed on the Gyakuten Saiban developer's blogs and some parts of the development cycle are practically never mentioned. In the seventh blog post for Gyakuten Saiban 2 (Ace Attorney 2 – Justice for All, director Takumi decided to write about a group of unsung heroes: the bug checkers. The people who have to play the game again and again in search for bugs. And that's not just programming bugs: they also need to look out for story bugs: contradictions that would mess up the story. Takumi explains why these people are so important, especially when he's working on a game. As always with the Gyakuten Saiban 2 blog, the post is followed by a section where Naruhodō (Phoenix Wright) and Mayoi (Maya Fey) add their own comments to Takumi's post.

Combing for Bugs

By the time we had recovered from the damage caused by the two meteorites, we were already welcoming the arrival of summer. And late summer was followed by fall, and development was finally nearing its final battle. And around this time, a new team starts its activity alongside our team.

A group called the “Bug Checkers”.

The industry term “bug” has become quite known nowadays, but simply put, bugs are faults or programming mistakes in the game. The Bug Checkers are a professional organization that specializes in playing games in development and finding such mistakes and faults.

“If you press A while you change the screen, the game stops responding to the controls.”
“If you open the Court Record and immediately close it again, the screen goes black for a second.”

…They do detailed checks for all kinds of situations for us, as we’re busy with the development. There are a lot of bugs that only occur under very special circumstances, like doing a certain input at a certain point within 1/30 of a second. If I were to describe this team that looks for these weird bugs in an unnecessary cool way, it’d be: “Lone hunters who hunt for wild beasts set loose in a wild Electric Jungle.

The bugs they find are put on a list, which is delivered to us. The person responsible for the bug then corrects the bug, writes their own name on the list and then the Checkers confirm one final time. And so the bugs are deleted one by one. You don’t see them on stage, but it is thanks to their help from the shadows that a game is completed. I want to use this occasion to thank them. You really helped us out. Thanks for all your work.

…But…to be honest… there is a reason why I have to say thanks especially. On the Gyakuten Saiban 2 (Ace Attorney 2 – Justice for All) Bug List were about 1000 bugs. And if you look at the signature of the person who was responsible for correcting them….more than half of them say Takumi. So more than half of the bugs in Gyakuten Saiban 2 were made by my own hand.

Typos. As I’m writing the scenario, it’s natural I’d make a lot of these mistakes. There were about 200 of them. But there were others, like the speed and the ‘pause’ of the dialogue lines, the animations of the characters, the timing of fade ins and outs of the screen, mistakes in setting the music or sound effects…

And the most deadly ones: comments about contradictions in the story. In short, Real Gyakuten Saiban.

 “The alibi of ○○○ in episode ○ doesn’t hold!”

And with that, I’d need to make drastic changes again in the scenario…

You can’t avoid doing this sober work if you want to complete a game. They’ll probably help me again in the future. …I hope we can maintain this work relationship.

Combing for Bugs (Backstage)

By the time had recovered from the damage caused by the two meteorites, we were already welcoming the arrival of summer. And late summer was followed by fall, and development was finally nearing its final battle.

Naruhodō: TakuShū doesn’t really like summers.
Mayoi: Oh. Why?
Naruhodō: He doesn’t have air conditioning. In his room.
Mayoi: Eeeeh!
Naruhodō: And this summer was particularly hot. His TV even broke down.
Mayoi: …I don’t think that’s the summer’s fault.
Naruhodō: It was so hot, he would get all dizzy whenever he went to sleep. So he quickly decided to get air conditioning.
Mayoi: Oh, so he finally got it?
Naruhodō: No, but you see, he stopped feeling dizzy after a day or two. So he thought: “Then I don’t need it after all.”
Mayoi: … Why won’t he buy one? Is he broke?
Naruhodō: I don’t think so. He supposedly said that summer is the time to fight.
Mayoi: Did he at least get a TV?
Naruhodō: Nope. He hit the thing hard with both hands, and then it worked again. So he thought: “Guess it’s alright then.”
Mayoi: Sounds almost like a lie…
Naruhodō: He cried “Take that!” when he hit the TV.
Mayoi: That is definitely a lie!

The Bug Checkers are a professional organization that specializes in playing games in development and finding such mistakes and faults.

Mayoi: Oh, “A professional organization” has a cool ring to it.
Naruhodō: TakuShū appears to be quite grateful.
Mayoi: He’d better be.
Naruhodō: Gyakuten Saiban isn’t really a game to play over and over, right? But during those checks, those people need to play it again and again.
Mayoi: Really? I also played the game two, three times.
Naruhodō: It’s a whole different level. They have to play it twenty, thirty times.
Mayoi: Wow. That is amazing.
Naruhodō: TakuShū felt sorry for them, so he’d sometimes change the dialogues or add more jokes.
Mayoi: Wow. A bit of fanservice.
Naruhodō: But because of that, even more typos were made.
Mayoi: …Why did he do that….

Typos. As I’m writing the scenario, it’s natural I’d make a lot of these mistakes.

Naruhodō: I have something good, but you’ll have to keep a secret.
Mayoi: Sure, sure. I love those kind of stories!
Naruhodō: In a game TakuShū made in the past, there was a typo they didn’t notice until the very end.
Mayoi: What kind of typo?
Naruhodō: The line said: “Looking for a cleu…”
Mayoi: …? What’s wrong with the clue?
Naruhodō: Read carefully. It’s not a “clue”, but a “cleu”.
Mayoi: …Wow. That’s confusing. …But how did he mess that up?
Naruhodō: And this time, around the time Gyakuten Saiban 2’s bug check was almost over, he brought this story up again. “You know, long ago, I made this one mistake…”
Mayoi: Reminiscing, right?
Naruhodō: And then one person asked: “Mr. Takumi, you didn’t make the same mistake this time, right?”
Mayoi: Hahaha. No way, right?
Naruhodō: …they all turned silent. So they checked, just to be sure.
Mayoi: Yeah. And?
Naruhodō: There was one instance. One “cleu.”
Mayoi: ….this is a pretty deep story.

“The alibi of ○○○ in episode ○ doesn’t hold!”
And with that, I’d need to make drastic changes again in the scenario…

Naruhodō: TakuShū actually knows too little.
Mayoi: Like what?
Naruhodō: Something unbelievable happened with the previous game.
Mayoi: Eh! What, what?
Naruhodō: TakuShū, he thought the statute of limitations for murder was ten years.
Mayoi: But I’m pretty sure it is fifteen.
Naruhodō: He only learned about this after he had made a flashback scene set ten years earlier. So there was a five year gap.
Mayoi: …Kinda unbelievable it didn’t break up.
Naruhodō: He somehow managed to rewrite the story.
Mayoi: I mean, unbelievable that the whole team didn’t break up because of that.
Naruhodō: … You’re right there.

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