I worked on an Xbox title many years ago, when I was still a bit inexperienced, and one of the requirements was that it had to run the attract mode for a week without fucking up. The other guy working on it was even worse than me, so no prizes for guessing who ended up sorting that out. And what a huge pain it was!
There was nothing awfully wrong with the code, sure, much of which had been through numerous PC games, and a lot of which was shared with the PS2 version... but finding all the stuff that wasn't awfully wrong, just a bit wrong, and wrong enough to cause problems after running it for 3+ days solid, was surprisingly painful. But I figured it out. Even if I'm not the sharpest tool in the box, I'm persistent, and I've been served well over the years by my ability to bring this to bear on whatever problem I'm facing. So I did that, and it all got fixed, and it shipped like that.
Once it got signed off, I started working on another Xbox title that was nearing completion. But by the time that one reached the certification stage, about 3 months later, the requirement had mysteriously changed to just 2 days! I wonder why...
That sounds like a pretty painstaking process, I would've been a bit deflated after finding the requirement was more than halved after you were done!. BTW what is meant by "attract mode" ?
(I expect what they had in mind was using it in shops, either running in the shop window, or as part of a counter display, and so on, and that drove the requirement that it had to run for a week.)
There was nothing awfully wrong with the code, sure, much of which had been through numerous PC games, and a lot of which was shared with the PS2 version... but finding all the stuff that wasn't awfully wrong, just a bit wrong, and wrong enough to cause problems after running it for 3+ days solid, was surprisingly painful. But I figured it out. Even if I'm not the sharpest tool in the box, I'm persistent, and I've been served well over the years by my ability to bring this to bear on whatever problem I'm facing. So I did that, and it all got fixed, and it shipped like that.
Once it got signed off, I started working on another Xbox title that was nearing completion. But by the time that one reached the certification stage, about 3 months later, the requirement had mysteriously changed to just 2 days! I wonder why...