Funny Goofs with Tutorial Testing

Hello! Jorden, here! I have a quick and funny story.

Last week at the conclusion of our bi-weekly livestreams (next one is tomorrow April 6 at 3:30pm EST on twitch.tv/rankwarmaster ) after going offliine Arthur mentioned that he had gotten one of our friends to playtest both of our tutorials as they were at the time. There were more than a couple things that needed fixing but the one that really stuck out to me was this friend's response to a joke I had written almost a year ago now which you see right at the start of the flight tutorial. At the beginning Ares addresses the player with the line "Welcome candidate [error, list not found]". I had thought this a somewhat funny way to show the lightly buggy nature of Ares right at the top and I figured my lack of any kind of code experience would mean that the error was obviously fake to anyone with computer experience. Both of our coders, Matt and Arthur, paid the joke no mind but our friend, who also works with computers, became very confused with the error he was seeing. I had apparently convinced him that there was somewhere for him to enter his name into our game for the purpose of the tutorial narrative (there isn't) and that he had missed this place. He spent some time trying to find it, too. Matt and Art probably ignored it because they know that there's no such system in the game to enter your name for narrative purposes (only for the multiplayer which is different) but it turns out that if you don't know the game inside and out and you do know computers that my error string was plenty convincing. So I was requested to change the error to something less convincing or remove the joke entirely.

The lesson here, if you're interested in such things, is that the value of outside judgement can never be overstated. Nonetheless I found the entire incident just hilarious and I had to share it with you all.

No feedback yet
Leave a comment

Click here to log in if you already have an account on this site.
Your email address will not be revealed on this site.
BadExcellent
(Set cookies so I don't need to fill out my details next time)
(Allow users to contact me through a message form -- Your email will not be revealed!)

What goes meow?
Please answer the question above.