Hacker News Reader

Comment by bregma | Hacker News Reader

Leading up to this the developers were pushing out twice-daily updates to the game. These guys give unheard-of levels of support to their base. They should be the object of study in academic courses.

View on HN

This seems to be the standard for indie dev studios [0]. They have to work harder and smarter than the big guys because their resources are in such short supply and they can't survive having a game that flops.

[0] Just look at Edmund McMillen (The Binding of Isaac, Super Meat Boy), Eric Barone (Stardew valley), Cardboard Computer (Kentucky Route Zero), Scott Cawthon (Five Nights at Freddy), Extremely OK Games (TowerFall, Celeste) or The Fullbright Company (Gone Home) to mention a few.

Indie dev studios also have the ADVANTAGE that they can do this - if Bob wants to post a blog he just needs to run it past Jim and Barbara - no need to run it through Legal, etc.

Also “management” and “devops” needs to trust every dev to push out a high quality update. Twice daily deploys don’t happen if QA goes through a 48 hour test process for every release.

Mind that the amount of QA you ought to have heavily depends on what game you're making - e.g. with a story heavy game, you 100% want give or take 3 weeks on every update for localization checks, or for a MMO you probably want to run new clients/servers with your testers first for about a week to make sure nothing catastrophic happens, which is especially important in online games(lots of bad PR and real money invested by players - you really don't want to have to roll back "saves").

All depends on budget and quantity of course, but this is what's usually planned for from my personal experience working in that sector.

the devs at factorio have developed an amazing test suite automation system to automate regression tests. I wouldnt be surprised if this is what gives them most of their confidence to do twice daily releases. I thought it was newer, but they seem to have had it for the past 6 years. So i guess my point is they dont need to 100% trust every dev (while I'm sure they could with such a small team) they can instead trust in the tests.

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-62 https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-186

Who owns the tests? Developers.

Wait, this went from twice-daily “updates” to release too fast. One is a blog post / tweet, the other is software related ;-) Where did you get twice daily _release_ from?

Release notes for updates pop up when you start the game. Last weekend I was starting the game twice a day. New release notes popped up every time. The "twice daily release" came from two or more updates being pushed out per day running up to the official 1.1 release.

Since the 1.0 release last year Wube has published what, 2 or 3 blog entries including the 1.1 release announcement?

Not a dev: " Twice daily deploys don’t happen if QA goes through a 48 hour test process".

Why does that matter, surely it's pipelined. If you feed in RC packages to a 48h QA twice daily then after 2 days lag you're getting tested code twice daily.

I'm not suggesting that's realistic for large software houses, just that the logic seems wrong?

I think the QA process isn't usually as pipelineable as you're suggesting. On a website it's often easy to QA changes that happen on page A at the same time you QA changes on page B. But in a game, especially one like factorio, it's probably a lot harder to find features that can be tested and deployed simultaneously with other features.

It would be easy to test changes to the design of Level 3 at the same time as changes to the design of Level 5, but it would be hard to test changes to the way inserters work at the same time as testing changes to the way conveyor belts work.

If the QA cycle is too long the developer gets out of the zone in that area - two days isn’t bad but some places you won’t get review or reports for weeks after submitting code.

I wouldn't call it standard for indie dev studios. It's certainly what makes a good indie dev studio stand out, and your list which is comprised of studios that make games in the top ~5% percentile of quality shows that.

They also know what they have - an extremely loyal fanbase and a great product that can stand on its own. See: they never put it on sale on Steam.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com