Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

C H A P T E R 7
criticizing your title. They don’t care at all about your team’s particular technology
hurdles, personality clashes, or budget woes, nor should they. They have paid to play
your game. You must deliver a compelling gaming experience to succeed.
Some see life as a game tester as their definition of a dream job. Getting paid to
play games all day long must be the life! Any tester will tell you that there is a huge
difference between playing extensively for enjoyment (which helped get you the job
in the first place) and testing a game title top to bottom by playing it for 14 hours
straight through (many times). As a tester, you are asked to intensely monitor all
kinds of game performance elements at once.
When considering game quality, you need to recognize the importance of the relationship
between the QA department and a particular game title. In particular, the QA
department will be giving your team volumes of valuable feedback on how your game
is playing. It is extremely important to do everything possible to grow the relationship
between your development team and the QA department. You must keep the communication
loop between these two groups wide open in both directions at all times.
The goal is to have a seamless exchange of information traveling back and forth. The
improvement of your game often depends on this very exchange. This is achieved by
treating the test department with the fundamental respect they deserve, as collaborators
with the same goal in mind: making great games. When they help solve significant
problems, just like other developers, they should be rewarded immediately.
Not every developer has immediate access to a QA department. Building and
maintaining a complete test department can be prohibitively expensive. The QA process
itself varies in formality around the industry. Large game publishers (like Electronic
Arts or Sony) have many testers onsite. An independent game developer, on the other
hand, probably has no full-time testers whatsoever. They might have a few production
assistants that help out with testing issues, but they usually rely on the publisher to
provide detailed testing.
Sometimes even the publishers themselves do not want to build up expensive test
departments, so they contract their testing needs out to an independent third-party
testing facility or testing service. These services are starting to pop up all over the
world. This can create workflow issues for game developers, since the game developers
themselves might be halfway around the world from the testers. In this case, you
can’t simply walk over to the test department, see a particularly nasty bug in action,
and walk back to your workspace to fix it. If your test department is on the other side
of the globe, it might take several e-mails, intranet jumping, phone calls, time-zone
considerations, and movie files to solve one of thousands of bugs. A developer sends
game builds (working versions of the game) to the test facility, and then must manage
and act on the testing feedback.
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Quality Assurance and Play-Test Feedback