On Monday, I found out our team needed to do a demo for an executive in the company on Thursday. One might even call him the Chief Design Officer. Monday was also the day our game decided to just blow up. Stuff just stopped working seemingly overnight. Unfortunately, a feature I developed also stopped working and was actually causing crashes elsewhere. Oh boy.
Three days might seem like an adequate amount of time to fix some crashes but the nature of the work involved jacked up my stress to levels I haven’t experienced in a long time. I worked late on Monday and Tuesday night, like super late, to ensure my code wasn’t going to cause crashes in sections of the game that I know the exec would be seeing. I think Tuesday was the worst day, I was probably stressed from the time I woke up to the time I went to bed, around 3am, because I didn’t know if I was going to be able to fix everything by Thursday.
Luckily, it all came together about noon on Wednesday. The senior management on my team was waiting for my fixes to be checked in, because they couldn’t even start to assemble a demo build until my stuff was ready. Gee, no stress there right? Once I checked in, my stress didn’t go away completely. I was really afraid that QA would come back to me and say shit was still broken and I’d have to look into it again, in a stressed out frenzy. Luckily, that did not happen.
I heard from the grapevine that the demo went ok today and nothing crashed. It was a long and stressful week for me and I wasn’t alone. Lots of other people on my team were working on crashes of their own. The game was super unstable this week and I’m not completely sure why that was.