Programming

Will try to keep this as short as possible.

8YoE here, got a new manager. A couple of weeks ago a bug comes up, i fix it, he gives me shit for it, doesn't allow the fix to go ahead, and says i got it wrong.

He then proceeds to make a deal out of it, intentionally says in the standup, in front of his own boss too how "he was let down, and that feature is broken still".

Literally less than 2 weeks later, he comes back and asks me to apply the same fix i did initially, because "he evaluated the situation, and found it best".

He made me look like i have no idea what I'm doing in front of the team and management.

Dude also micromanages, with things like "i sometimes look at branches, so don't push any code you haven't personally tested, even if it's to a branch you're not intending on opening a PR for" lol.

A few days ago we had a 1:1, and unprovoked he tells me "you need to know something, I'm the boss! I make decisions, it's my team" this wasn't in response to something i said. No, he literally just stated it

We have been working on our game for about 5 months. And no one outside of us has played the game. Just recently we started to reach out to people and looking for playtesters. Finally, we got our first one. A YouTube content creator offered to play our game on twitter.

Anyway

As he played, he ran into a lot bugs. While annoying, ( everyone wants their game to be as polished as possible when someone plays it) this wasn’t really the surprising part, instead it was immensely helpful. I wrote them all down to be fixed. Some bugs he found I didn’t even know about, nor would I have been able to find them as breaking your own game is harder than you first think.

Here's the thing that surprised me. It was when he started asking things like

"How?"

"What am I supposed to do right now?"

It was clear that he was confused about a lot of aspects of the game. I was shocked as these were things that we would never have thought players would get stuck on or frustrated with. He couldn’t figure our game out so much so that he couldn’t finish the demo. So, imagine if we released the game without proper testing. That would mean hundreds of returns and refunds if other players couldn’t get past the first few minutes of the game.

Not because they didn’t like it, or bugs, but because of design choices. At least with bugs you can fix them and release an update. But sometimes if you get too far in development UI, tutorials and design choices become hard to change.

When I test the game I created how could I ever see from the point of view of the player who knows
nothing about the game. It’s quite impossible. Without play testers developers can only assume the player will know how to complete this quest, find that item or so on.

But now that someone else has played our game, we now know and have the opportunity to better explain
those things, fix and tweak. And continue to send our game to people to play so that it can hopefully be an intuitive experience in the end :D

Bottom line: Have other people play your game outside of yourself or you will never know if your game is even playable for players. It’s not only bugs that makes your game unplayable! (Also, thanks to MattFTAD for playing our game, check em out below.)

The video -

Our game's Steam page (Ranching, colonly sim, resource management, any wishlist appreciated!) -