Hard Knocks Lesson #3: Check your GM

No, seriously.

Yes, even after sending out the build, get your publisher to send you a copy of the disc they're sending to get pressed. Get them to send you one of the first discs off the line as well.

There's some hilarious and not so hilarious stories, all of them dealing with a complete failure between a developer submitting the build and the publisher sending off the disc for pressing. In the last 10 years, I have yet to work on a title where this has gone off perfectly.

One of them is a PC title I can talk about, since the publisher is no longer in business.

We were doing the usual thing of finishing the US PC build first, then sorting out EFGIS a few weeks later. We ship off the US build at the start of the month, take a few days off, then get cranking on the the EFGIS build. About a couple of days before our shelf date, we get a bug from publisher QA that the EFGIS build goes out of sync in multiplayer with the US build.

This is scary. So, we check here with our US final build and our EFGIS build, and the only difference is in our localized text and audio - the exe and data is all in sync, which means there is nothing being sent that could throw either client out of sync.

After a day or so of head scratching, the project lead decides to ask the publisher for their US build, you know, just to make sure they're on the right build. They insist they're using the final build, and send us an ISO of the final disc.

After receiving it in the morning, we install it and see that it's from a week before GM. You know, the build with last minute crash bugs and without the last minute tweaks we slaved over.

We head to lunch, and bemoan the fact that our publishers are incompetent jerks who can't even manage to copy the right build onto a bloody disc. We laugh and make comments of "oh well, at least it wasn't the build two weeks before". We're sad that what people are going to play isn't perfect, but there's nothing we can do - after all, they've printed 50,000 units so far.

We get back from lunch to find that this disc was forged in the depths of hell. After getting out-of-sync issues off the same disc, we find out that:

• The installer on the root of the disc is the GM minus 7 days build. This is installed by running install.exe manually.
  
• There's a directory on the disc called "autoplay" for the autoplay code. In that directory, is another copy of the game - the GM build minus 20 days (essentially, our beta build plus two weeks). The autoplay installs this build.
• GM minus 20 days is an unencrypted version of our game data
• GM minus 20 days includes our in-house custom tools for data packing, localization, mesh exporting - pretty much our entire custom toolchain.

Luckily for us (and unluckily for our publisher), shipping our in-house tools is a breach of contract. Lots of calls are made. Many people who make money off other people who make money off us get mad.

Somewhere, there is a landfill that contains 50,000 copies of the frankenbuild.