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Monday 17th March
Testing in games development
Today we had guest speaker Georgia Mae Ayling, a QA Analyst at Rocksteady Studios come to class to talk to us about QA testing in games development.
What is QA– Quality assurance. Insuring what you have made is of a desired level of quality, at every stage of the process.
Responsibilities of a QA Analyst:
- Build verification
- Document processes
- Finding and reporting bugs
- Usability testing
- Writing, maintaining and running test cases
- Develop testing tools
- Verifying bug fixes
What is quality assurance in the context of making games?
- Functional testing –
- Generalised QA testing
- Playthrough testing
- Smoke testing
- Localisation testing –
- Fluent in multiple languages
- Checks the game makes sure linguistically and culturally makes sense
- Checks dialogue, text, numbers and dates are correctly localised.
- Compliance testing –
- Checks the game meets regulatory standards set by first party platforms.
- Dev QA –
- Supports QA teams with testing
- Supports design teams with troubleshooting
- Can act as a connection between QA and other development teams
- Can establish process and guidelines for wider testing.
- Specialist field testing –
- Engine/performance
- Design systems
- Network
- Game specific elements
- Animation
- Audio and more.
- SDET – Software development engineer in test –
- Writes, develops and manages automated testing.
Design changes vs Bugs
| Design issues/ usability | Bugs |
| Is the game playable to someone who has never played the game before? Examples of issues may include: ✧ Unclear objectives ✧ Narrative issues ✧ Confusing visuals ✧ Inconsistencies | A defect in the software. Code does not function as it should. Examples of issues may include: ✧ Crashes ✧ Performance issues ✧ Cosmetic issues ✧ Functional game flow issues ✧ Certification / Compliance / Legal issues |
A QA team can help identify both things.
What does testing for user feedback look like?
Testing for design changes:
- Watch someone play the game
- Give as little pre-amble information as possible
- Take detailed notes
- Ask questions
What does testing for bugs look like?
Testing for bugs:
- Try everything possible to ‘break’ the game
- Don’t play the game normally
- Try to account for every scenario the game will be played in
What are the limitations of testing your own work?
- You know what you’ve made
- Giving yourself honest feedback is hard
- Scale of resources
- Training yourself to think differently:
- Designer
- Player
- Player who has never played games
Advice for testing your own work:
- Set your quality gate and stick to it – the standard you want to achieve with this product.
- Break it down into sections – focus on one feature at a time, giving you a better chance of finding all the bugs.
- Get feedback on your product
- Every game ships with bugs – disaster planning ahead.
Advice for working with a QA team:
- Document your work clearly – the more information the better
- Test your work before you submit
Georgia’s talk was very useful and relevant to what both the team and I have been working on recently – The playtest and my camp survey.
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Thursday 20th March
On Thursday we gave our group presentations on what we have achieved so far. Here’s what I included on my slide:
What I’ve done so far:
★ Created resource icons for the UI.
★ Created the survivor camp background art.
★ Conducted a user feedback survey on my background art.
★ Begun creating the resource camps.
My Main sources of inspiration:
★ Films including Wall-E and Mad Max, and games like Fallout and Surviving the aftermath.
What’s gone well:
★ I’ve gained some really useful feedback on my artwork which will help me make the game art more comprehensible to first time players.
Despite missing Yiran, the presentation went really well. We ended up behind asked two questions by the class:
- Would you consider working on this game concept further, outside of the assignment context?
- Is the artwork featured going to be the finalised version/style?
Our responses:
- “Yes, we believe this game concept has a lot more to offer then we have planned to produce for it. There are so many mechanics and narrative design choices that could be further expanded on.” – Personally I said I would really enjoy working on this game as I feel like its full version has so much to offer.
- “With the exception of the UI because of its recent addition, the art direction has been established and influenced primarily by the character art and its polished, bold graphic style.”
Group blog post on the presentation:
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After the presentation we had a short meeting with Sophie, where we discussed what we would get out of the playtest. She advised us to focus on testing the new implementations to our game (UI, Tutorial and the intuitiveness) that we were less confident about, as we had already received feedback on other areas in the first playtest.
We also revised our to-do list:
End of week 8 😀
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