League Of Replays

Most of us work in cubicles which is great when you need to nerf someone to get their attention. It may be a little boring but there's how it goes.

In the morning before I leave for work, I normally check the forums for any critical issues or details on bugs that are occurring. I also ask questions to try to make it easier for me or someone else looking at the issue in the future to figure it out. I often raise issues on important ones when I get into the office or by email. Then I walk down to the office (30 minute walk) and say hello to Raven. Check my email for any emergent work, and figure out what things* I'll be working on the for the day.

Then I start coding... testing ... coding ... BAM! now design can add those machine guns to teemo. Half the time I'll be interrupted by a designer or someone asking about how a particular system works or for some new feature. Depending on the priority, I may have to switch mid task, although we try to keep that down because it wastes time switching all the time.

Then at some point we have a morning playtest of the up and coming build. Just about everyone in the company plays. At the end we round up and talk about oddies we saw in the game and take notes ... high priority ones turn into "must-fixes" later in the day. I walk away half the time when they get into balance decisions as these can take a while (and design are the ones responsible for that).

Then there's normally a quick scrum* meeting where we talk about what we are working on and anything that is preventing us from continuing (hurry up with that design doc Guinsoo etc...).

After Scrum - Lunch. I think this is the most difficult part of the day... we often spend 10 whole minutes figuring out where we want to go. Make a decision guys... When we get there... I order and then I use a knife and folk to pickup for food (unless its something I can eat with my hands)....

Then I do some more coding ... testing ... deep thought problem solving ... BAM removed armored bear support again from the game yet again (dam Volibar and creating more work). Then sometimes I'll have a meeting with one group or another to discuss design of a future feature / tool. We have a planning meeting that occurs once every 2 weeks where we plan for our sprint*. Here we debate and figure out what we are going to work on next. We make sure to leave enough time to work on emergent issues (ie hotfixes, un-expected new design features etc...).

Is it fun... you bet. Not all the time but I find the most fun thing is completing some new feature and being able to see it work. Of course its not all fun and games. There is a lot of every-day work to get done. It can be stressful at times as well given the large amount of things we need to get done versus things I'd really like to see done. It can be frustrating to try to hunt down a problem and continually run into dead ends. However
I find it a great reward when I finally solve the problem.

*Typical task include:
- Looking into recent issues that occurred in the game (ie what you see as hot fixes)
- Working with designer to add new features for the game (ie new attribute types etc...)
- Fixing top issues in the game, fixing issues for our future game
- Working on feature requests for our partners (ie for GOA an Tencent)
- Writing documents on future systems
- More recently I've been helping in a small fashion support the effort to help us track down issues/bugs faster (ie automated testing, systems for monitoring the servers etter for things like lag etc...)
- Support other engineers in their task.

*Scrums are typically made out of people in the team created to solve a particular set of problems (ie I'm currently on the team to improve our efficiency in creating stuff by making builds easier and adding more testing tools). Some people are on more then one.

*Sprint
2 weeks of work in a particular group of people (ie the people in the scrum). The team can change depending on the sprint.

You are not going to have to wait for the next patch.

Hi Guys,

We appreciate your concerns here. It actually is one of our major focuses at the moment. Riot is spending a lot of programmer time on is improving our process. We have a large part of the development team working on tools to help us track down bugs(crashes, game bugs, lag issues etc...) faster/earlier and also put out builds faster with less downtime.

We have several ideas about improving the testrealm, which we are developing. As you can imagine this is not a simple task and does involve some significant re-working of some of our systems which takes time. It kinda slows us down a little in other areas for now but this will pay off down the track. We are thinking long term at the moment.

I hope that's helpful.

Note: Pendragon made a post about this a little while ago with more info but I can't find it atm.

We'll be updating the Test Realm throughout the course of tomorrow, and want to get in some games with anyone that is interested.

I'll post the changelog as soon as the build goes out.

We'll be aiming to have a few games around 7PM PST (GMT-8) so if you are around, we would love to hear your feedback.