Barbie Gold Master

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    • Barbie Gold Master

      (Forgive any spelling/grammer errors, I've basically been up for a week straight with shots of 2 - 3 hours of sleep here or there.)

      We submitted the Gold Master candidate today. All-in-all it looks pretty damn good. We now have about a week of slamming out builds everyday to fix everything we can before it actually ships. At the end of next week (I think; maybe it's the week after) we submit one final build which, if accepted, will be burned onto a bazillion CD's. Sometime by Christmas you will see Barbie Diaries: High School Mystery on the shelves.

      This will mark my second game ever shipped, and my first game with a programmer credit (and a design credit for some reason). While I'm sure Barbie is not what most people here play, if you do happen to have daughters, neices, cousins, or whatevers of the appropriate age who like Barbie, give it shot. It's a damn good game (yes, I'm biased).

      When you work with such a tight team, it's hard to brag about what one person did. "Notice how when you click on a door when people are talking how it doesn't crash? That's me, baby." God that was a painful bug. Not as painful as the flash fullscreen issue. Or the hack where someone cast a std::string pointer to a void* then back to a std::string pointer, causing a crash when we changed the first variable's type to StringId. What was he on when he wrote that?? Only the mentally ill would want to be a professional game programmer. ;)

      I think I had a point. Hopefully it was made somewhere above. I'm gonna crash; next week will another brutal one.

      -Rez
    • If you think you're happy now - wait until you see some kid in BestBuy begging her parents for the game....that is a pretty neat thing.
      Mr.Mike
      Author, Programmer, Brewer, Patriot
    • Thanks guys. I crashed for 14 hours that night and proceded to have two days of hardcore fun, so I'm feeling much better now. Back to the grind!

      -Rez
    • How many release candidates do you guys usually end up going through on launch? We botched this one, so we're working on GM2 (Gold Master 2). I remember at Maxis our second release candidate is what ended up shipping. I'm wondering if 2 - 3 is the norm.

      -Rez
    • We're probably going to build RC2 & submit tonight. Hopefully this one will pass.

      Rich: Yep, we use Lua quite extensively in our games. All game-specific code is Lua (nevermind the HarryPoemBookStealthTest() function ;) ).

      -Rez
    • Nah, I won't get in trouble (we discussed it at length in the Lua round-table at GDC). We use tolua++ and have been very happy with it.

      -Rez