IT Support Horror Game Dev Thanks Player Who Filed a Bug Report With a Fix in the Code
The game, which centers on IT support tickets that chip away at a system administrator's sanity, met a player whose bug report was as professional as a full-time IT engineer's, and the developer acknowledged it in the patch notes.
Reporting from 1 source: Automaton.
Independent developer Stefan released the horror comedy adventure game I.T. Never Ends for PC via Steam on August 14. Days later, a user filed a bug report on the Steam community board about an infinite loading screen loop, explaining why it happened and providing fix code. Stefan, who could not identify or reproduce the bug, thanked the player in the August 18 patch notes.
The game combines IT support work with the Cthulhu mythos. Players act as a system administrator at a company, approving or rejecting inquiry tickets through swipe controls that shift four metrics: productivity, morale, budget, and entropy. Let any one hit zero and the player is fired or triggers ruin for the whole company.
Some tickets demand direct resolution through mini-games, from routing puzzles to timing gaps in moving mechanisms. Inquiries range from realistic login failures to a keyboard scattering ectoplasm and an unnameable creature in the Wi-Fi network. More than 100 endings await.
The August 18 update was notable because Stefan used the patch notes to thank the user who reported the loading screen loop, a bug he could not reproduce himself.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.