I love ferrets. So so so so so very much.
(especially my own, Muta. He’s 7. He’s the best ferret in the world.)
This is Narita, the assistant producer. Nice to meet you.

We’re going to take a little bit of a break from the developer’s… passionate stories and talk about debugging.

Debugging: finding bugs, and getting rid of them.

It’s a short word for an excruciatingly long process.

As the game that we’re dealing with this time is an online, multiplayer game, obviously we can’t debug with just one person.

And we don’t have nearly enough just using the people on our production staff.

We hunt out everyone new to the company, pull back designers and sound people from our team working on new projects…

It’s… well, it just requires a lot of time and people.

Little by little, the bugs get uncovered, corrected, checked, and the game slowly starts to stabilize close to its final, packaged version. Around this time, we enter the playthrough stage to make sure everything runs smoothly.

This means, we don’t give any specific directions to the staff other than play the game normally. It’s close to what it would be like if someone was just normally playing the finished game.

Even the staff usually forget they’re working and get really into slugging it out against each other.

The newbies get tweezed out, and people like Kaizer and his team eventually get fat on the feast of victory.

Take down a sore loser and you’ll probably be stalked the next match.
(Which, they get revenge points for killing you, so it’s what they’re supposed to do, but still…)

It’s a grueling, survival of the fittest deathmatch magnifico.
You can hear the cries of pain throughout the office.

This is a pic of the freshman staff, getting their heads handed to them (thank you for your debug work, new guys).

Right when I joined debug, I ended up being crushed, immolated, frozen, at any rate, I died many a time.

But while I lost, I learned. I grew! Now I’m confident enough to rip apart a whole team of newbies. (which is, tough love of course. Nah, it’s just sadistic pleasure. Hehehe).

But once you’ve become really good, you can play with people who are skilled as well, and when you finally work off that very enjoyable bloodbath combo, you realize you’ve made a good game.

I can’t wait for you all to play it.
The finished product looks pretty fabulous.