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 Features
Postmortem: Blue Fang's Zoo Tycoon 2: Marine Mania
 Bugs and Other Vermin…
We were building Marine on top of the original Zoo Tycoon 2, along with the previous expansions of Endangered Species and African Adventures and the premium downloadable content released in the Dino Danger pack, not to mention the previously released free downloads. So the test matrix for what the player could have installed was enormous.
Some of the changes that were made in Marine actually required that changes be made to ALL the animals. This meant that every animal (oh, and that number is just shy of 100) needed to be retested to ensure that nothing was broken along the way. At one point we realized that one of the system changes that we were making was going to result in edits to more than 1700 files! This made our QA manager very nervous, and rightly so! After evaluating the risk, we found another way to implement that change without changing the core system.
We also felt that in general, team members should have played Marine more. As a developer, you’re often so busy getting your work done, and fixing the bugs that are assigned to you, that it can be hard to just find time to sit down and play the game. At the very end of Marine, we wanted to keep team members on hand and available in case any issues cropped up and did not want to release them to work full-time on other projects. But at that point we had really locked down changes, so we had these developers spend time playing the game; and when they tested their own functional areas, it was amazing the things that they were able to zero in on simply because they knew what should be happening. We wish we had done a lot more of that sooner!
Some problems were found pretty late which led to some stressful periods when we had to quickly make changes, some of them reasonably serious. It was unsettling, but all in all it was simply a huge job for QA between the new content and various expansion packs.
In spite of some of these 20/20 hindsight moments, we’re impressed at the level of testing that was done and some of the amazingly creative things that our testers found.
Marine Mania's launch party
Conclusion
Blue Fang Games has a long history developing the Zoo Tycoon series, and over this period of time has become intimately familiar with the challenges of making games for a broad-based market. Through it all, we’re always striving to improve our product and our processes, always with our eye on being the best at creating compelling, emotionally engaging games focused on the animal kingdom that set the benchmark for broad-based family entertainment.
We take pride in our abilities to work with our partners and in delivering creative and quality product reliably and dependably. Every project has its ups and downs and no project is ever perfect; after all, if it were how could it ever get better? But all in all, the highlights on Marine far outweighed the lowlights and it will always be a project that I look back on with fond memories.
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