I actually did some real telecommuting today. Yes, I remotely check my work e-mail in the evenings but it’s an entirely different story when you’re making changes to the game and then checking them in from home.
At home, you have access to the game code and data but there’s no way to check if anything you’ve done will break the game. When you’re sitting in your jammies, you don’t have a console with you so you can’t test stuff. It’s generally frowned upon to make code check-ins from home.
This morning, I checked my work e-mail and discovered a problem had appeared in one of my areas. A producer sent me a message detailing what had gone wrong. From that, I decided that if I removed one line of code the problem might go away. So I phoned the producer up and told him what I was going to do.
I took the line out and checked in my changes from home which is a first for me since I think it’s a pretty risky thing if you can’t test it. Since I had to go to the movies, I couldn’t stick around to find out if the change fixed the problem. I e-mailed the producer and told him to e-mail me with the results. Then I left to go see Spider-Man 3.
Later on, I checked my e-mail again and it seems the problem was fixed by taking out that one line. If you’re interested, the line I took out was this:
pGame->MakeGameCrash();
Ok, so nerd humour isn’t universally loved.