This interview with Michaël Chinchilla was conducted during a visit to the Kylotonn studios (find the introduction here). Michaël is lead programmer, in charge of a team of nine people dedicated to gameplay. Their aim is to link the work of the other poles and create the tools that the others need.
Working in an agile way, the developers in charge of the gameplay chain work phases (sprints) whose objectives coincide with those of the other poles: UI/UX (interface and user experience), design of vehicles and environments, level design, engine … Between Lyon and Paris, with some people in total telework, communication is dematerialized. No offense to some, it works well. Partly also because of the recent health crisis, which has improved the tools available to ensure effective remote work.
Another of their responsibilities concerns QA, ensuring the link between the internal team (composed of 5 people) and the external company which reports to it on a weekly basis the bugs found on the last shared build. Thus, Michaël's team manages the submissions made to Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, in order to ensure that the game fits into the ecosystem of each of the services. Test batteries are carried out by these providers, who have different expectations regarding the way the game must manage the possibilities of their consoles. Crossplay has brought an unprecedented additional difficulty, with new rules to satisfy, sometimes a little twisted.
Sony is a priori the most finicky. A very simple example: if a user is blocked, all the content he may have generated must be hidden. Xbox does not a priori have the same expectations on this side… Moreover, when I ask Michaël if he has an anecdote to share with me on this subject, he tells me about this recurring bug which drove his team crazy during four weeks. A game crash when an Ethernet cable was disconnected, and which was resolved in the simplest of ways: thanks to the update of the SDK provided (the development environment specific to each console).
The department may have to curb certain unrealizable desires of other teams. Even if after so many iterations of the same game, things are now well established, the machinery well-honed, and the dialogue more and more natural. The gameplay team collaborates on a daily basis with the one in charge of the engine, in order to propose and integrate the changes necessary to support the gameplay. It is also a big advantage for them to have end-to-end mastery of the development, and to be able to understand how each brick works by looking directly into the engine code if the need arises. We also spoke with the technical director in charge of the engine, more information on this subject to come!
As a conclusion to this very instructive interview, Michaël shares with me a maxim that was transmitted to him by the person who trained him:
A video game, it does not end, it is abandoned
Because even if from his point of view this WRC is undoubtedly the best, the perfect product is not possible. With always this frustrating side of the developer unable not to see all the faults.
