The
Dung Dev Diary Part Two had us looking at Character Development and Design - this time Firemint takes us into the world of Quality Assurance.
Part 3 – Dung, Putting the A in QA
QA is playing games all day and getting paid for it, that’s what some hopefuls think. QA stands for Quality Assurance, and it's another name for game testing - a lot of our QA applications look like this,
“Hi i play games ALL the time you should hire me because i would be the BESt at it I play games perfectly and i can beat all games on hard send so tell me what salary i would get.” - Anonymous
We get the impression that not everyone completely understands the nuances of game testing. Being good at playing games doesn’t always mean you will be good at testing them. Just think about those forum posts about crashing apps; it’s not only expert users that find buggy code.
QA may not be the dream job that you think it is; it’s not all tightening up the graphics on level 3. A lot of the time you are playing the same part of the game repeatedly hoping it doesn’t crash. If the game is working well and fun you won’t get to play it any more, but on the other hand if you do find a bug, you need to spend the next 20 minutes reproducing and documenting it.
Our QA department here was charged with testing 29 handsets from 6 different handset manufacturers. With all these handsets it would take over an hour every morning just to install the latest builds. In addition to this, we tested the game on 14 different PC configurations, all in all finding and verifying as fixed nearly 1000 bugs!
A game tester can’t just play the game randomly, blindly wandering around looking for bug-ridden Dung code. They need to make sure that they test all areas of the game, from the first shot of Dudley dancing on the splash screen, to the credits where the testers see their own names up in lights. A tester needs to make sure they test every feature in the game. In order to do this, they follow a test plan. This helps them verify that every time Dudley throws dung in the air, it lands where it’s supposed to.
Most of a tester’s time is spent following the test plan looking for new bugs and confirming that old bugs have really been fixed. If, for example, a tester finds a bug where a snake eats some dung, turns into a vulture and flies away (actual bug!), they will search to see if it has happened previously and either add their comments to that entry or create a new bug report. When a tester files a bug report, it contains the unexpected behaviour seen (snake eats dung and flies away as a vulture), what the expected behaviour was (snake eats dung and slithers away with it) and what steps can be taken to reproduce the bug (throw dung at a snake).
During testing, QA can also have an impact on the game design. On Dung our testers even took charge of creating challenge levels since they had gotten to know the game inside out. Getting feedback on the experience of playing the game is also critical and our QA team was a huge help in making sure our game was as fun as it is. At the end of Dung, QA were enjoying the game so much we weren’t sure if they were looking for bugs or just playing the game!
See you soon!
That's the final developer diary from Firemint on the road to turning Dudley the Dung beetle from a winning Project Joystick idea into a game. Excuse the colours in the images, we'll see what we can do about them! Thanks!
