testing

It possibly sounds weird to a lot of people. But I find testing interesting and challenging. Not to find z-fighting textures, clipping issues or missing GUI elements of course. But testing is more than hunting these type of bugs. To me it’s about helping the developers. To pin down an issue. To develop a game the players love.

There is a huge variety of tasks and challenges. In a vertical slice you have to anticipate how things work, look and feel in later stages and provide feedback about gameplay and balancing. No matter how the things don’t work yet. With online-games you turn vague customer reports into reproducible issues. During polishing stages you report all the minor optical and gameplay issues that adds up and harms the user experience. Before a game can be submitted to a platform owner (Nintendo, Sony, etc.) you do checks if the game meets the requirements the owner has defined. For a mobile game you write test automation scripts to check all basic controls or localizations with numerous different devices.

I love the challenge to find out what triggers a random bug. Is it the order of play, certain hardware or other circumstances? To be able to provide real “steps to reproduce” and not only an “it happened when” description. To help the programmers fix the issue instead of having to mark the issue as “unable to reproduce”.