I just checked our subscribed count on Steam and we’re at a little over 2100 subscribed players. That’s fantastic! Let’s keep the ball rolling. Tell your friends! Tell your family! and tell everyone you meet!
Without further ado here’s the next of our Developer Discoveries:
Name: Tod Hostetler
Position: QA Manager
What is your history?
Well, actually I applied to the CIA as a joke, the result of losing a bar bet. The application is 50 pages! At the time, I had no idea why they accepted me, but 8 months later I was jumping out of a helicopter at night in Nicaragua with an MP7 and a packet of… Oh, you mean my game testing history.
I’ve been in QA since 2000. Activision, EA, Disney and a smattering of smaller publishers / developers / startups dot my resume. In addition to games I have a fair amount of mobile social media platform testing under my belt. It’s pretty rare to find someone that sticks with QA as long as I have without getting the itch to go into production, but QA is my calling. I can count the number of bad days at work I’ve had on one hand, with fingers left to spare… how many people can say that? Due to my experience I usually get tapped to lead the QA effort into unexplored territory, creating new teams and procedures to match emergent challenges… keeps it fresh for me. For example, Mercurial was the first time I’ve organized an all-volunteer staff of testers that have never met face-to-face. Finding the right solutions to this particular challenge has been very fun for me.
Favorite Computer game?
Even a list of my top 20 wouldn’t do justice to my love of electronic gaming so I will decline to answer. I will instead say this: whatever Creative Assembly (makers of Total War) are doing with the Warhammer license… when that release date arrives, I personally believe that it very well might be the most important day of my computer gaming lifetime, past and future included. It’s a great studio with an outstanding track record of quality, it’s a fantastic universe, and I think it’s a match made in heaven. And the mods… oh god, the mods that will come of this union… I’ve got goosebumps.
What are you doing on Mercurial?
Currently? Breathing a sigh of relief as some new blood has come in to help with the testing. Now that we’re on Steam, we’ve discovered a difficulty with testing unreleased local builds; the Steam seems to really want to take over. So I’m working with DEV to see how we proceed; do we release untested updates onto Steam and hope for the best? I don’t like that idea; I’m confident we can avoid it; we just haven’t yet discovered the ideal workflow. Every morning I check the Steam forums and migrate any audience-discovered bugs to our database. Finally, I’m advising the team on how to pare down a list of what we will and won’t fix before we call Mercurial ‘finished’ and move onto our next project… which is already deep into the early design phase.
How did you come to be on the Mercurial team?
At the start of this year, I moved from Los Angeles to tiny little Shingletown population 2800 in order to care for my beloved grandmother. There’s no opportunities for me to keep my QA buzz on up here in a professional capacity, so I headed to Shadowrun.com to advertise my availability to help test UGC. Initially I helped with this or that project, but when the Mercurial staff approached me and described the project, I decided it was worth my full and exclusive attention.
What’s your favorite part of Mercurial?
Besides the friendships that I’ve gotten to form with this awesome team? That’s such a tough one for me, as the person who has logged so many hours on testing Mercurial. I’ll go with the moment when the player tells a certain character to “Stop saying chummer”. It makes me laugh a little every time, and believe me I have played through that scene a hundred times. Still gets a chuckle from me. I also want to mention that a girlfriend of mine wrote the lyrics to one of Maria’s songs for this game; and approving my request that it be used was the DEV team’s way of thanking me for my work, as a personal touch. So every time I see that, too, I feel appreciated. It’s the song Quicksilver, by the way… don’t forget to stop by the concert stage and check it out. The feeling that I’ve helped contribute a tiny bit of canon to the Shadowrun Universe…. feels great to me.
So you want to join a mod team?
A lot of new would-be modders see the Editor as an opportunity to dream up their own personal creation and have that feeling of Total Control over every aspect of it. Even though some few people have been successful with this approach, the SRR mod battlefield is littered with the corpses of unfinished projects by people that tried to go solo. It’s a hard road to go solo; just be warned. And I personally hate thinking about all those hours of work that went nowhere, when it could have been part of a bigger project.
I would like to see more people that are entering the mod community try it this way. Learn the editor just enough to script a simple scene or two, a conversation or two, a ‘this key required to open that door’ kind of thing or two, and a combat or two on a map or two. Then post online that you want to join someone else’s project, and once you join it, try to focus on the best possible combination of what you’re inclined toward / what the project needs. You don’t need to know everything about everything… if you know something about something, and willing to put the hours in, believe me there’s no project that can’t benefit from having you onboard.
It really is so much more fun doing this as part of a team, even if it’s just two people. While there is such a thing as too many cooks in the kitchen, with proper respect for each other’s contributions all things are possible. Remember that your first idea is always your worst idea. ALWAYS. Having a team around to call you out on your bad ideas is invaluable. Call your teammates out on their bad ideas, but never say that idea sucks, always say I think we can do better if we think about it more. Stand your ground defending your opinions for exactly two go-arounds with the group. After that, concede graciously and let it play out.
Smoothly recover from failures of communication with your team. Be willing to have arguments with your teammates ONLY if you are willing to acknowledge that you might be wrong. If you are wrong, or even if you just got hot-headed and accidentally insulted someone on the team, or if you just get out-voted on something, be gracious about it. Make your apologies when necessary. Similarly, accept apologies from your teammates when they get out of line. No aspect or feature of the project is so important that it is worth a loss of friendship or trust within the team.
I think that’s my best advice. I choose to stop typing now.