Chapter 1187: Trial Operation Caught Off-Guard
August 18th, Sat.u.r.day…
As usual, Yan Qi came to the office building where the morning was at work and continued looking for bugs.
To be precise, finding bugs was only his second goal. His first goal was to verify the authenticity and generalizability of his guess on the rules of metaphysics last week.
Was this magical land ineffective over the weekend? Was the Bug not working over the weekend?
He had to verify this question.
Last weekend, Yan Qi asked his testing team to work overtime for two days in vain. In the end, the bugs that were found after two days of overtime were not as many as the ones found on Monday morning. The efficiency was really worrying. If he had known that the overtime efficiency was so low, he would have let everyone rest at home!
Thus, Yan Qi told everyone that they would work overtime this weekend. If the efficiency of looking for bugs was still low on Sat.u.r.day morning, they would just rest this weekend. They would continue looking for bugs after the working days and feng shui areas returned to normal.
At that moment, almost everyone from the testing team of the Blade of the Empire had arrived. The testing team of the other companies had also moved over one by one.
All the work desks in the office building had been rented out. Even the two floors above and below had been rented out.
However, even though everyone was discussing enthusiastically in the group and had even attracted many companies from other cities, many companies in the group still did not partic.i.p.ate.
Perhaps it was because the person-in-charge of these companies had a stronger scientific quality and a stronger will. Thus, when it came to such metaphysical problems, no matter what others said, they were unmoved.
Of course, Yan Qi did not care about these companies.
To him, reminding them was already very kind. They could come if they wanted to. In any case, the efficiency of looking for bugs in this place was very high. Whoever came would know!
The person-in-charge of the other testing teams basically recognized Yan Qi and greeted him one after another.
However, when he pa.s.sed by the work desks of other companies, he could clearly see that the test personnel had some doubts on their faces.
“Eh, that’s strange. Why are there fewer bugs today? There aren’t many bugs left.”
“Are they all done? That can’t be.”
Obviously, they had noticed the huge change in the efficiency of looking for bugs on Friday and Sat.u.r.day.
Yan Qi suddenly remembered that he had not told other companies about this.
He quickly sent a message to the group.
“By the way, I forgot to remind everyone about something. Last weekend, I realized that this place’s feng shui did not seem to work during the weekend. Therefore, I don’t have to worry even if I can’t find any bugs. It will be back to normal on Monday.”
“I only arranged for the test to work overtime for half a day today to verify this matter. At the moment, it looks like this rule is satisfied. Therefore, if everyone doesn’t have other work, you can go back and rest and conserve your energy. You can continue to fix the bugs on Monday.”
Soon, the people in charge replied.
“Huh? Bugs don’t work over the weekend? That doesn’t make sense!”
“That’s not scientific, but it’s very metaphysical! It’s already very unscientific for a s.p.a.ce to have bell-shaped geomancy. Then, it shouldn’t be surprising that this s.p.a.ce exists in a certain time pattern…”
“I don’t believe it!”
“Look for more bugs. If the efficiency really decreases, it means that what Boss Yan said is true. There’s no need for everyone to look for bugs under inefficient circ.u.mstances. We might as well do something else.”
This time, the people in the group seemed to quickly accept this setting.
Even though this still sounded very ridiculous, most of the companies that had moved here had gone through metaphysics after all. They had objectively recognized the existence of this special s.p.a.ce. It did not seem like a big deal to add a little time rule…
Yan Qi sat down at his desk, took out his cell phone, and ran his game a few times.
Yes, as expected.
The bugs did not work on weekends!
In fact, Yan Qi was a little conflicted before he ran away. Should he hope that there would be bugs or not?
If there were bugs, it meant that they had to work overtime during the weekend. However, the progress of the game could be rushed forward by a large margin. If there were no bugs, they could not rush the progress, but they could rest during the weekend.
Now that the dust had settled, he felt more at ease. That gave his employees a reason to rest for the weekend.
Not bad.
In fact, as the boss, Yan Qi was more conflicted about overtime.
He was not like many unscrupulous bosses who forced their employees to work overtime without compensation purely to reduce costs and further squeeze their employees’ labor. However, even as a boss with a conscience, it was inevitable to ask his employees to work overtime.
After all, as a small company and entrepreneurial company, they did not have many resources, abundant numbers of high-quality employees. Sometimes, if they wanted to catch up, they had no choice but to work overtime.
The game industry was an industry that emphasized on efficiency. If two similar types of games were released and one game was released one or two months after the other, the income gap might be millions or tens of millions.
For small companies, the difference in speed was enough to determine the life and death of the company.
Thus, in order for the company to survive, Yan Qi wanted the employees not to find new jobs. In order to distribute more bonuses in the future, he sometimes had to ask the employees to work overtime in order to speed up the development process.
He often felt conflicted about this.
The employees might understand this behavior very well and be very cooperative but Yan Qi still felt a little bad.
Great, there was no need to think about it now. Since there was no such thing as working overtime over the weekend, and there was no such thing as efficiency, he might as well give his employees a break to adjust their state. They could continue fighting bugs next Monday.
At that thought, Yan Qi said, “Alright, I’ve verified it. It’s indeed inefficient to fix the bugs over the weekend. Everyone, order Fish-Catching Take-Out this afternoon. I’ll treat everyone. You can go home after eating!”
“Of course, if you have an appointment at noon, you can leave early.”
The employees cheered.
“Boss Yan is awesome!”
“Thank you for treating, Boss Yan!”
Thus, a small portion of employees who had arranged to meet their friends for lunch or wanted to go home for lunch left after greeting Yan Qi. The other portion of employees stayed and waited for lunch before leaving.
Yan Qi no longer looked for bugs. Instead, he opened the official website of the Dawn Games platform to check the current state of the platform.
He didn’t know if he didn’t check, but after he checked, he was shocked.
“Huh? The game platform started testing yesterday afternoon?”
“I did mention this before, but isn’t everyone still fixing bugs?”
Yan Qi vaguely remembered that the staff of Dawn Games had talked about the test run in the group chat previously. However, everyone was working hard to change the bugs. They were so busy that they subconsciously thought that the test run had to be postponed.
There were only a few games. How could the platform test the waters?
Now, he realized that he had to try!
He opened the gaming platform and saw that everything was normal at first glance.
There were also various recommendation spots on the front page of the platform and into different areas according to the game type and equipment. The content was not much and could not be compared to the hundreds or thousands of game platforms. However, it looked quite neat.
Yan Qi opened the action game column out of habit.
After all, he was in charge of action games. He wanted to see if there were any compet.i.tions with his own games on the platform.
However, when he clicked on it, he realized that his own game, Blade of the Empire was there!
“Huh? That’s not right. Isn’t our game still being modified?”
“Why are they already on the gaming platform?”
Yan Qi quickly opened the game’s details page.
There was a summary, information, and promotional pictures of the game on the details page. These had been given to Dawn Games previously, so it was not surprising that they appeared on the platform.
The original downloadable game / Initial game b.u.t.tons were not usable. There was a special notification column that showed the current number of bugs in the game ‘Blade of the Empire’!
This number seemed to be directly captured from the game’s testing platform.
Yan Qi asked the testing team leader, “Eh, did Dawn Games ask us for the data interface in the testing platform?”
The testing team leader nodded. “That’s right. We gave it to them after signing the contract. After all, they have to know about our bug repair in real-time.”
Yan Qi opened other games and found that most of the games were also modifying the state of bugs. The only difference was the number of bugs.
Occasionally, there would even be changes in the number of bugs, which meant that this company was working overtime. After repairing a bug and submitting it, the testing team would verify that there were no problems and complete the modifications. This bug would be eliminated. Thus, the number of back-end bugs would also be fixed, reflecting on the game platform in real-time.
On the other hand, most of the games on the Dawn games platform were in this state: they could see how many bugs there were left, but they could not play.
Yan Qi flipped for a long time before he finally found a game that he could play. It was an old game that had been released on other platforms half a year ago. According to its lifespan, it should have entered the later stages of life.
There were very few bugs in such games because the version of the game was very stable. However, it also meant that there was no new content. The attractiveness of new players was basically zero.
Even though the games that had not been released like ‘Blade of the Empire’ were mobile games developed by small companies, they were at least new games. They were still quite compet.i.tive in the mobile games circle.
In the end, compet.i.tive games were all fixing bugs. Games that were not compet.i.tive could not attract many players.
What’s more, even though Dawn Games platform had made some distinctions between games that could already be downloaded and games that were now bugs, such as making special labels on the game’s icons and screening games that could be played, it was not that obvious.
As a result, gamers who entered the platform immediately found that they could not find a game to play. They clicked on one and found that it was fixing bugs. Then, they clicked on another that was still fixing bugs…
One could only imagine how painful it was.