There are twelve things to check

Every test build opens on a screen that isn’t part of the game. It says this copy expires in seven days, that there’s still almost no voice acting, and what has changed since last time. You press a key to get past it, and then the ship starts.

For eight rounds that screen told people things. From today it asks.

A list of changes gets read and nodded at

We know exactly how people react to a list of things somebody did, because it’s how we react to somebody else’s changelog: fine, nice, next. Nobody stops reading to go and check.

A list of things to do works differently. You open the settings, flip a switch, watch what happens, and if it isn’t what you expected you write it down. Which is the only reason a test build leaves the building at all.

So the second screen now says: press F3, flip the switches, cover the colours with your hand and tell me whether you can still tell what state each control is in. Set the text to the largest size and play for half an hour like that, and if anything runs off the screen, stop and write to us. If your graphics card has vertical sync set to “fast”, stare at the menu for ten seconds without touching anything: does it still flicker?

Twelve lines, numbered. The numbering earns its keep when an answer comes back: a tester writes “I didn’t get number six” instead of “the one about the switches, or maybe the one about the colours”.

The text was small because the page was doing two jobs

Splitting that screen in two came out of a fault that had been sitting there for months without anyone naming it.

The page was holding both the warnings you have to read and the account of a whole week’s work. To fit both, the body text had been dropped, and dropped again, down to twelve and a half points across three narrow columns. In a build from a few days ago the columns actually overflowed, and the cut was invisible: the extra text simply vanished.

On a screen that also speaks to people who can’t see well, and that nobody is allowed to skip, that is the worst possible place to make text small.

Now the warnings are three boxes and nothing else, and the body has gone from twelve and a half to twenty-one. Same information, nearly twice the size, and we didn’t invent the space: it was taken up by the account, which has moved down into the notes file that ships with the build. A text file has no bottom of the page.

The second screen stays optional. One key opens it, printed large inside the prompt. Anyone who doesn’t open it wouldn’t have read the old list either.

What stops a tester isn’t always in the game

This part isn’t about a line of our code, and it’s the one that moved us most.

One of the people testing the game downloaded the build and Windows made it disappear, saying it had identified a threat. It wasn’t in the recycle bin. She tried several times, convinced she had done something wrong.

The file was in quarantine, which is a locked storeroom most people don’t know exists. And the cause is ours: our executable isn’t digitally signed. A signature is a certificate you buy, and it tells Windows who made the program. Without one, this game is a program with no name as far as Windows is concerned, and that is how it treats programs with no name. It isn’t finding a virus: it’s saying it doesn’t know who we are.

We knew this could happen and we had written it down nowhere. It hadn’t come up yet only because everyone testing the game so far was technical, and technical people recognise that block and walk past it without even mentioning it. People who aren’t stop, and report nothing: they quit, and they think they’re the problem.

The build notes now open on this, with the procedure written for someone who has never heard the word quarantine, and with the trap spelled out: the block comes in two separate moments, first the antivirus deleting the file and then a second system refusing to run it. Anyone who gets past the first stops at the second, convinced they achieved nothing.

The no-install version, the one you just unzip, now has a folder inside it too. Before it was seventy-six bare files: anyone using “Extract all” never noticed, because Windows makes the folder for you, and anyone dragging the contents out scattered them across their desktop.

A digital signature is still the only thing that removes the problem at the root. It costs money, and it will be bought before the game goes on sale.

A line that explained the solution and then denied it

There’s a container held shut by straps, and you open it by pressing on the side. The right verb answered that the straps wanted lateral pressure and that it wouldn’t come open that way.

Read cold, the sentence contradicts itself. Inside a game it doesn’t: it reads like a hint. A tester read it, concluded he needed a tool, and went looking for a hook that only appears inside the description of something else and can’t be picked up. He was stuck there. Thanks to Mauro Sergio, who wrote it down instead of going round in circles.

Before fixing it we asked the code, target by target across all ten screens, which verb actually carried the effect. The raw count came back with twenty-three suspects. Looking at them one at a time, twenty-two were refusals written on purpose, along the lines of “it’s a tool, not a container” or “it’s a platform on wheels, it has no lids”, or refusals that name the thing you’re missing, which is how a verb game helps you without telling you.

There was one real fault. It was the one place where the gesture that opens is only a gesture, with no key and no tool: there the verb had nothing to ask for, and said no out of habit.

Names in the closing credits

The closing credits now name the people testing the game, in the order they arrived, and the first two who donated something.

Adding names means a longer roll, and as long as the duration was a number typed by hand the roll just ran faster. No error, no failing check: closing credits slightly quicker than the ones that had been approved. Now there is one number typed by hand, the speed, and the game works out the duration by measuring how tall the list is.

We haven’t watched them scroll with the new names yet. That’s line seven on the second screen.