The last six episodes of this diary have been retrospective. This week however, Future Gamer brings you right up to date with a report on the state of play at Rebellion during the final stages of Alien Vs Predator’s development.
Jason Kingsley

Before a game is play tested (the process of balancing a game and making it as pleasurable an experience as possible) it must be bug-tested. This is a slightly more complex procedure which usually begins at the ‘alpha’ stage – ie. when the game is almost complete, but just not very pretty to look at. This is the stage where major software ‘bugs’ are unearthed.

Software bugs, as anyone who has ever tried to string two lines of code together will know, are the most infuriating and annoying obstacles facing any game developer. Bugs can occur for the simplest of reasons, a comma or full stop in the wrong place for example, and, worse still, fixing an apparently simple problem can often lead to the development of a whole new bug (or bugs).

The bugs which are found earliest in the testing process are generally the most obvious and the most severe. They can range from something as slight as a character’s head being slightly the wrong shade to the game simply refusing to work from a certain point. As the bug-testing process continues, the bugs become more invidious and difficult to find.

We had a couple of beauties thrown up during the bug-testing of AvP. For example there was one graphical glitch which reversed all of the polygons, i.e. everything which should have been visible wasn’t and vice versa. This produced some of the worst graphical atrocities ever to make it to a game screen. Another, even funnier, bug turned the Predator into a total coward. How we laughed.