A Retrospective: One Last Job's 🐞 Best Bugs 🐛
Sit right back and hear our tale...
Hi! Lucas here, and I hope you're doing well. This newsletter comes late in the month thanks to the start of the 2024 cold & flu season AND the end of production on One Last Job (for now!). I got sick and had to prioritize finishing the game... so that I would have something to tell you about, here and now!
And boy howdy, am I excited to share the last bits of polish our folks put into the game through September! In the previous newsletter, I told you about how to build crews in One Last Job; I'm going to start this time around by giving you a tour of where things stand with the gameplay, end to end.
After we've done that, I thought it would be fun for me to share w/ you some of the best bugs my crew built into the game (intentionally? accidentally? who knows!) throughout the game's production!
A Three Hour Tour! A Three Hour Tour...
Your crew's on the job performance
Every job is made up of phases which are set in a scene. Like watching a caper movie, your crew will act out the various steps of the job, and you'll be able to follow along as it progresses!
Here, your crew is out on a straightforward job: pick some pockets while distracting the marks. The job is a success, though it was close considering Pippa's flub at the end!
I'm very happy with how this turned out, and I appreciate the effort that Robin (linktree) put into it.
I hadn't expected so much visually-engaging activity during the performance of these phases, and I love the way the crew is represented. If we have more time next year, I'd love to come back through and make more improvements to the visuals – it's just so much fun to watch these little doll-folks do things!
Visualizing the good and the bad
While your crew is performing their duties, we need to roll some dice to find out how well they do. Every roll is helped or hurt by the various perks, quirks, boons, and injuries that your crew brings with them on the job.
Each concept & modifier is a specific word/phrase which exists as part of a family of related words and phrases (this simplifies the game mechanics).
A Researcher and a Translator are both part of the "Knowledge" concept family, and either will excel at tests which require specialized knowledge (for example, performing an Investigation test). Someone who is Catfooted (a member of the Sneaky perk family) will excel at tests that require silence (for example, performing an Infiltration test).
You CAN send everyone you have on a single job, but since you want to maximize profits & success over time, you're going to want to pick and choose who goes out on which job...
I love the ways these icons look; Heloisa (Behance) did a great job communicating meaning without writing a single word.
Want to play hide-and-seek? Good players are hard to find.
The best way to kill a joke (like the one above) is to explain why it's funny.
When localizing a game, every single joke has to be explained in detail, so that the localization team can figure out how to tell the joke (or tell a similar joke (or tell a joke that's equally funny but for different reasons (or tell another joke altogether because the original joke isn't funny in their culture (or...)))).
If you don't share context in advance, then you could end up with some weird questions from your loc team when they show up to do their jobs – or worse, a direct translation of something that doesn't make any sense because it lost its context in the process:
Additionally, when localizing a game, you have to deal with maximum lengths (for amount of text written & amount of audio recorded) so that everything fits into the space available. Because every element of a game (a clickable button, an item in your inventory, the name of a monster, etc...) usually has a static size, it's hellish for the localization teams to find the best way to say something in the space available.
It's not an easy job at all, and I want to say again how much I appreciate the work that Bea (X), Clément (homepage), Daniel (clane_k on Discord), and Dave (.avodavo on Discord) have done, both in localization AND in fact-checking some of the nonsense text we gave them to localize!
How To Play
Finally, although you've been following along with the game's development over the last few months, not everyone who tries the game will be in the same boat!
Billy (linktree) put together a "How to Play" animated/interactive slideshow which I think looks great and is a ton of fun to read:
I like our implementation here - it's not a forced tutorial that you have to play every time you start the game on a new device, and it's also not a static list of actions you have available (ala the mid-00s console controller "map" that you still see in a lot of games to this day).
My only real concern is that there's no way to check something later in the how-to guide w/o clicking through the whole thing – do you think that will be a problem? Let me know!
Making the Best of Things (It's an uphill climb)
Now let's go behind the scenes to see how we handle bug reporting @ Triple Eye!
Whenever we're playing / testing, we are also recording with OBS. We use a custom scene which captures our input devices (using an input overlay add-on), so that we can see anything that's typed, clicked, or pressed in the lead-up to a bug happening. All of the bugs you're about to see were gathered with inputs showing, so I've left them in!
Okay? Okay? I think we can do better than that!
Let's start with a very early look at One Last Job, before your crew did anything interesting. Note the die roll for the "Extraction" phase -- we can't do any better than a 6, man!
The Phantom of the Opera is there, inside your mind.
Yeah, right. And Grizzly Adams had a beard.
One of our own team was affected by a vicious bug... which would randomly remove facial hair. On the plus side, now Drummond knows what he would look like with a full shave.
Join us here each month, my friends!
The next time you hear from me, you're sure to get a smile – I'm hopeful that I'll be sharing three Steam store pages with you & inviting you to go and wishlist Another Round, Null State, and One Last Job. Let's all hope for the best, and I'll try not to repeat the same mistakes I made last time...
I've been trying to close out each newsletter with a teaser picture for next month, however this time I just want to share the Track A music that Julian (site) put together for One Last Job's background music – it's very loopable, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!