Most developers have never seen their own application. They have seen it inside the thing they build it in, and those are not same picture. I found that out six hours before release.
Scaling Laws opened in a window exactly 1920 by 1080, on a desktop exactly 1920 by 1080. Title bar sat above the top edge of the screen. My own bottom bar, the one with the clock and every tab in the game, sat behind the Windows taskbar. Resizing was disabled, so a player could not have fixed it either.
The project is twenty nine days old and I have opened it hundreds of times. The first thing anybody would ever see, and I had never once seen it.
Not because I was careless, Unity editor draws the game inside its own window, with its own title bar, at whatever size the editor feels like. The one screen every player starts on was the one screen my tools were structurally incapable of showing me.
That goes wider than games
- Your dev server runs on a different port than production.
- Your test database has ten rows in it.
- Your browser has your extensions in it.
Every tool that makes you faster also shows you a version of your work that nobody else will ever get.
The build
The build went out yesterday. Thirty people have downloaded it. Nobody has told me a single thing.
It is a very early alpha, so I am going to assume it all went perfectly and nobody hit anything confusing. Obviously.
The report button is in the main menu and in the pause menu. It sends the build number and how far into your campaign you got, and nothing else. One sentence about the moment you got confused is worth more to me than the thirty installs, because that moment is the thing I cannot see from here.
This week: fix whatever comes back, and finish the disk shelf in the server room that has a texture, a grid of lights, and nothing drawing it.
Thirty downloads is a number I did not have on Saturday. Zero reports is a number I would like to not have on Wednesday.