Another long stretch without any updates. Since E3, we have been crushing bugs and working 24/7. It’s been brutal, but we did get to ZBR last night at midnight. Now we’re closing in on fixing only the crazy weird bugs that we feel just break the game or make us vomit. :)

This is also a time in the project when most of the team is locked out of the database and “have” to play the game all day. What poor souls.

Me, well I get to sit in a cold dark room triaging bugs for most of the day, then fixing some of them into the night.

We’re almost done and it’s playing so damn good!! I can’t wait for you all to join Noble Team on Reach in just a few months.

-Marcus

20 minutes to our first floor demo!

Hope you got to see the keynote address and our glimpse of Reach’s campaign. This was just one small look at a very large picture. -Marcus

Just landed in LA. Looking forward to see how the show turns out this year. -Marcus

Yes, I know it’s been way too long since I last posted.

The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of madness because we’re bringing this giant game in for a landing. I won’t lie, there’s been some turbulence and some areas of the game are coming in hot, but we’ve got the landing gear down, the runway is visible, and the engines are throttling back.

In the midst of this 24/7 period of crunch for the game, we are heading for ZBR (zero bug release). We have a huge team of testers who are hammering on the game in every way possible and logging tons of bugs about things that are broken, look bad or finding exploits that make the game just plain silly. Then, the development team is tasked with triaging all of these bugs every day and determining which ones are things we must fix and how we should prioritize them over other bugs. The goal is that our fix rate for bugs is higher than the incoming rate, so we can crush all these nasty critters by ZBR. It’s tough work, but ultimately this kind of diligence on our part means that you all get to have a better gameplay experience when you have it in your hands this Fall.

That said, we are still having fun with last minute “fixes” (which some could argue are really new features – shhh, don’t tell Harold, our CEO). For instance, I just came in today and met with our campaign design lead, Chris Opdahl, and he showed me something he and the engineers cooked up yesterday with vehicles vs. biped physics that I’ve been begging to see happen since I started Halo1 back in late 90s. I won’t spoil the fun by telling you what it is, but needless to say, it will make you a very happy player to finally see this.

-Marcus

This week ends the last week of polish for content in the game. At midnight tonight, the artists are shifting into hard core bug fixing mode from here on out until we hit ZBR (zero bug release). While content artists are bug fixing and engineering is optimizing for performance, the designers will be hard at work finalizing all the encounters throughout the campaign.

There are many tired eyes due to very late nights for everyone here. It’s often hard for developers to switch gears from cramming as much time as they can into polishing content for the game to closing the game out. It’s my job, as well as all the other leads here, to pull these people back to see the amazing game we have created together and make sure they fix all the bugs that really matter for the game to be as high a quality product as possible.

-Marcus