2XKO Developers Detail The Life Cycle of a Fighting Game Patch

It's Friday, so it's time for another Weekend Warmup from the 2XKO team. This time, their post sheds some light on the typically opaque element of fighting game development.

As always, if you want to read the full post (and we recommend doing so if you want the full details), you can find the original post below.

To put it simply, the developers separate the main stages of a patch into several chronological milestones:

• 6+ Months Out: This is where the team figures out major changes for the game two seasons in advance, including things like new champions, major features, and skins. After that, the development on the patch starts and happens on the dev-main build of the game.
• 6 Weeks Out: At this stage developers carve out a separate build with all the content, fixes, and features that are ready to ship. The leads go over this build and make sure that things are ready to go, and if not, they will be bumped to the next patch. This is also roughly when "localization lock" happens, because introducing any text changes after that point would introduce significant logicstical issues.
• 3 Weeks Out: This stage is called "Zero Bug Day," and as the name suggests, it is focused entirely on identifying, categorizing, and addressing bugs. With only limited time available, developers try to zero in on the most important issues and fix them before release, while the rest can be taken care of later. After this is done, the builds are submitted to Sony and Xbox for review before the update can ship.
• Patch Day: Once the builds are approved and everything is ready to go, the team comes together early in the morning to coordinate everything that needs to happen before flipping the switch and dropping the patch. Things like comms, additional QA of the final build, building the executable, upgrading databases, pausing matchmaking, and adjusting season/matchmaking configurations.
• Post-Launch: Now the patch is out, but the work is far from over. The bugs still exist, and new issues might arise when thousands of players get their hands on the game. How quickly they get addressed once again depends on analysis of how critical and reproducible these issues are, but also whether or not they're sever-side or client-side. Server-side issues can be addressed immediately and invisibly for the player, while client-side changes will require the next patch.

If this all sounds too simple, keep in mind that the team has to work on 3 patches at once. At any given time they are cleaning up from the previous patch, working on the current one, and getting work done for the next patch.

Outside of this, the Weekend Warmup post once again highlighted Riot's involvement in the local scene. They have recently rolled out local rewards program, which has been going well, and you will see more of at the PAX tomorrow.

Here are the next 3 community events for the NXKO (2XKO based grassroots community from New England):

As for game content, 1.1.5 patch and Akali will arrive on April 7th.