Game Developers Come Clean on Their ‘Crimes’ from Various Projects

Recently the co-founder of the indie studio Fullbright made a tweet calling all of the game developers to confess their greatest sins. This may seem surprising because you don’t normally think there would be many issues when it comes to these projects. Surely with so much staff and financing they can deal with any problem in a professional manner, right?

Please share your most embarrassing game dev crimes. Mine: all the scripting in Gone Home is contained in 2 gigantic uScript graphs, bc I didn’t know about interlinking many smaller graphs at the time. It’s only 2 bc the first one started running too slow to navigate. Your turn.

— Steve Gaynor (@fullbright) December 14, 2018

Following that single tweet came a flood of incredible responses from fellow game developers!

Years ago I worked on a handheld port of Rollercoaster Tycoon. No one could figure out how to stop players from making penises out of the tracks, so every member of QA made about 25 coaster penises and those specific shapes are the ones that are banned

— Eclipse Jared Rosen (@notquitefrodo) December 17, 2018

One of this character’s cutscenes in Colony Wars III: Red Sun has my facial capture performance because I deleted a file and was too scared to tell anyone pic.twitter.com/1XjkgySOYe

— Duncan Robson (@dunkr) December 16, 2018

During a school project we had a segfault that would happen at the very end of our game Rather than spend hours debugging b4 our presentation we just took a screen shot of the end screen and set that as the desktop wallpaper so when it crashed to desktop it looked like the end

— Benny ??? (@BennyPeake) December 16, 2018

On Madden 2003, we had a bug where all the players vanished.

Just a stadium, a field, and a ball at midfield.

A Jr coder named James said:
“Did you check inside the ball?”

Smirking, we checked w/ the debug cam. AND THERE THEY WERE.

Tiny players, in formation, in the ball.

— Jim Hejl (@jimhejl) December 18, 2018

The final scene for the final TTG Sam & Max game can never be changed, because I baked the lights in Maya, exported the lightmaps to the game engine, checked it in, then slammed every program on my PC shut because we were supposed to be locked hours ago. never saved the Maya file

— Jake Rodkin (@ja2ke) December 16, 2018

This is truly my most embarrassing game dev crime because it involves data destruction. But I can (mostly) laugh about it now.

— Jake Rodkin (@ja2ke) December 16, 2018

In Trivia Murder Party we had an extra column to fill in the leaderboard. Couldn’t think of another stat worth tracking so I said to add “Charisma” and have it always set to zero, as a joke. I still regularly get questions about how to raise your charisma in the game.

— Arnie Niekamp (@misterarnie) December 16, 2018

Made an RPG. Engine didn’t support NPC walk areas so NPCs could walk into doorways and they would block the player from using a door. Solution was to make invisible NPCs that stand in the doorways to block other NPCs but let the player pass through.

— Michael Kidder (@fyrewulff) December 16, 2018

In first Arma all male soldier heads have the same mesh and normal map based on my head, because I was the only one willing to shave my hair to be 3D scanned, using our (back then) hi-tech Olympus laser scanner.

— Petr Pechar (@The_Araon) December 16, 2018

On Fallout 2 I thought it would be genius to make the brahmin poop. I made them periodically drop a small random plop asset from the Modoc explosion. I was very proud! That week I got a bug from QA that if you soaked the game overnight it would crash because of too much shit!

— Tom French (@pardontomfrench) December 17, 2018

These responses showcase the wit of developers when faced with an issue they cannot, or are too lazy to, overcome! Which one was your favorite?