Developing a New Major

creative side has to play a lot of games to be able to do competitive analysis and feature comparisons, if you want to go into that you need to have a protfolio that shows off your creative ability, need to stay current on industry news – read gamasutra and game developer magainze regularly

producer side – learn how to owrk with teams, do project management, lead project, find out about the business side of hte industry, being a big gamer not as important but will give you some credibility with others, work up from QA and production assistant

QA testers – dn’t always need college degree – have to be avid gamer, you make contacts thru out hte company and hopefully after a couple of years you can find someone to show your portfolio too, have to be really good as a qa tester, be a self starter, have to build your own network

some game companies have you sign away rights to any game ideas you come up with while you’re working at hte company even if developed on your own time – so watch what you sign

localization is another good way to get into the business

Testing and Test plans

• test early, test often, test all areas of hte game, stress test multiplayer online games
• give testing dept copies of hte design docs so they know what design is supposed to be – then when they test they can see if it works the way the design docs said it was supposed to
• be sure to test new mechanics
• lead tester involved from pre-production so they have time to make thorough test plans – ex: test all the weapons, all the levels of weapons, all the weapons used by all the characters
• could have list of features and checkbox to say if the feature works or not, pass or fail
• main parts of each level includ  – is the score updated, were objectives triggered, does cut scene load, does character move as expected
• put on spreadsheet – play a chunk (a level) mark  all the bugs on the spreadsheet and put in the bug db
• talked int he workshop about looking at the spreadsheet to see if bug updated (not sure how spreadsheet gets updated)
• run thru game level by level, as you get closer to being done, run thru whole plan again and before going gold master go thru the whole test plan again

have a couple of core testers

hire some temps for a couple of weeks during the heavy testing

put more people on as you get closer to being doen – not something to be done with 1 or 2 people on a big game

testing is time consuming and if project gets behind people think you can just take time away from testing – ddoesn’t work

lots of QA crunch time

be sure to build testing dependnecies and adequate time/peple into budget/schedule

overestimtae the time and people because publishers tend to cut QA first

lead tester can be 1st alert if you’re behind on milestones because they also see milestone definitions and interim builds

types of testing – milestone testing, play testing, marketing and demo testing, wall crawls, bug tests and retests

gotta include time in schedule for fixing the found bugs and retesting

play testing means you need to have a bunch of testers early to make use of their feedback

producers and leads may need to prioritize bugs – fix now, fix in patch later

need a bug tracking pipeline – record in DB – version # of build, where in game it occured and the context, the type of bug (art, enginnerring..), severity (like crash bug that has to  be fixed immediately or minor bug that’s just irritating or bug report as feature request), steps to reproduce

bug reports need to be detailed so we can tell later if bug fixed or not, include actual results and expected results

one bug per report to make fixed bugs easier to track

console manufacturer have specific requests for how game has to behave (also guidelines about your design)

code release phase

• no bug fixes, just test
• people start to work on other projects
• keep some around to fix any last minute bugs
• don’t intro any new features just because you’re in the code – that usually just introduces a bunch of new bugs

closing kit – after code release and console approval – bundle up everything used to create the game – all the raw data for models, audio, tools used, documentation, master version of game – - it’s a project archive so you can go back later and create patches and sequels – use the kit to recreate your previous environment —- store it lots of places – onsite, offsite, at the publishers

gold master is version 1.0, patches are 1.1, 1.2

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