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RPGVault has put up the third Black Moon Developer Diary, written by Lead Programmer Eric Langlois. This time, it's all about programming:
As I mentioned before, many of the pieces composing BMC were already in place when I took the lead of the team, but in order to follow the development schedule, the ability to add new features rapidly to the core game was needed. We went off the standard, more recognized development methods I was used to and tried something different, extreme programming (or XP). We are not using the full XP methodology yet but we are using some essential concepts - stories, continuous integration and test cases (when writing new code). I found the stories to be the most valuable part of XP, it gives us great flexibility in planning and comes in handy when communicating with other teams and upper management. Among the different concepts that make XP interesting, one that I would like to integrate in our work is pair programming. It has been encouraged since the beginning, although with not much success. This different, and sometimes frightening, way of developing software proved so successful in our team that all production teams adopted it, enabling the production department to quickly add features, prototype new ideas, or correct bugs and let every one in the company see and test the evolution of the game.
Even though we have been successfully using XP to quickly deliver new features internally, releasing a patch to the public is a very demanding operation. Yet we try to do it as often as possible because we want our beta testers to test every new feature we put in BMC. Before each release a patch must be prepared and this rarely goes smoothly… We need to assemble all the work made by the artists, the designers and the programmers in order to produce the patch. Just imagine running after all the material, putting it together, testing it, tuning it, re-testing it, re-tuning it, re-testing it… and so on until the patch is ready to be released; all of this in a very short period of time. Now you know why I hide on the top of the nearest mountain on the weekends ;) |
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Black Moon Chronicles Dev Diary #3
