(8) TESTING & ACQUIRING FEEDBACK

TESTING & ACQUIRING FEEDBACK

After you have integrated enough of the game that is playable, it’s a good time to begin testing. In nearly all professional projects, testing begins long before project is completed. The process is fairly simple: Have someone play the game, knowing which part have been completed and which haven’t, and make sure those completed elements are working correctly. You can get the whole team involved in this process involved, or if they are too busy, call in some extra help. Usually little effort is needed to convince a fellow gamer to play-test a new game. Testing typically comes in two phases: alpha testing and beta testing. Testing can help you to finish the project and maintain its quality.

INTERNAL TESTING: ALPHA

Alpha testing is usually done in house among the team members. Depending on the size of your staff, however, you might need to recruit outside testers. Your testers should be aware of how the project development is progressing and precisely which elements have and have not been fully implemented. In most cases, you don’t want to release an alpha edition of your software to the public because you’re sure to get plagued with a barrage of emails from people who have no idea how your game is being created. Make sure security is tight for your alpha testing phase, and ensure that your team members aren’t revealing it to the web community.

Say, for example, that somebody leaked your game’s alpha version onto the Internet. At this point in your production, you have integrated player mobility and weapon functionality for only 2 of your 26 weapons. In addition, none of your vehicles have been programmed completely, so trying to enter one of them causes the game to crash because of the incomplete code. When alpha testers play the game, they know ahead of time exactly what they know ahead of time exactly what they can and can not do, so a game crash isn’t a problem for them. The general public, on the other hand won’t be able to understand your project’s current limitations. If they see your incomplete game, they could start generating bad publicity for your project based on their judgment of an incomplete game.
Alpha testing is a good way to collect data, make changes to your project, tweak functionality, and streamline the various aspects of your game. Eventually, you have each element of your project fully integrated and working correctly. Then you are ready to move on to the next level, beta testing.

EXTERNAL TESTING: BETA

Beta testing essentially works as the same as alpha testing, but it’s performed on an almost complete project. In most cases, you won’t want to release your beta version to the public either. Your beta version will eventually become the finalized game or project, so you don’t want it to be freely downloaded before the official release.

Be careful who you choose as a beta tester. Security is always a concern. Also it’s not enough for beta testers to just be gamers. They also need to be interested in helping you with your project by looking for problems that gamers could find, such as “holes” in the maps, nonfunctioning elements, and incompatibility with certain hardware or software. Also make sure that your beta testers are prompt with their feedback and aren’t just taking advantage of you to play your new game.

In many cases, you should take applications for your beta testers. An application doesn’t need to be formal, but it should ask potential tester what kind of experience they’ve had with beta testing, what kind of games they like to play, and what kind of computer they have. The last question can be important because you want to make sure your game or project is tested across a wide variety of platforms and video cards.

REMODELING AND CLOSING: ENDING PRODUCTION

You’ve built your game and are in the middle of the final tests, getting ready to release your project. At this phase, you should be wrapping up your beta testing, getting your web designer to start promoting the launch date, and finalizing all parts of the project. But what do you do with al this beta test data and, more important, when do you quit beta testing?

WHAT TO DO WITH BETA TEST INFO

The purpose of beta testing is to get feedback from a larger base of users to find and fix any nonfunctional aspects of your game or project. Collect as much as data as you can from your testers and cross-reference it with other testers to see what the biggest problems are. Use this data to fix your game’s most important problems. Processing all this data is a major task, and you will likely want to get your entire team involved. In the end, much of the repair work will probably fall on the level designer and the programmer, so try to keep them from getting tied up with other tasks.

Feedback from your beta testers is vital to finishing your project. You need to know what kind of video cards your game supports, what kind of drivers are needed, and so on. This feedback can also help you discover and repair the small (but still important) problems that arise in most game development. Beta testers can often tell you where loopholes are in your project.
For instance, say your map has a section guarded by two massive creatures, and it’s supposed to be difficult for players to pass. As it turns out, in a previous part of the map, players can drive a tank and with just the right driving skills, drive it all the way to where the two monsters wait. Players can then use the tank’s cannon and eradicate the monsters with practically no effort, thereby avoiding a challenge that’s been carefully crafted for them. Avoiding obstacles in this manner isn’t cheating, really. It’s just a section of your map that needs to be tweaked. With your tester’s feedback, you need to edit the map so that perhaps large obstacle prevents the tank from being used on the monsters. You need to remedy as many of these problems as possible.

Keep in mind that your project will likely go through several beta versions. After you finish repairing many of the problems that come up, make a new version available to your testers to help narrow down the number of problems even more before the project is released.

WHEN TO STOP BETA TESTING

Remember that a game can be like a work of art. Often, it’s difficult to tell exactly when it’s finished. When deciding whether your project is finished, you need to take a few factors into account. First take a look at the kind of feedback coming in from your beta testers. The number of serve issues should be winding down. More important, remember your schedule! Don’t go far off schedule during the tweaking process.

Keep in mind, too, that most games (excluding console-based games for systems such as Xbox or PlayStation) aren’t released in what most gamers might consider to be a fully completed state. Despite developers’ valiant efforts, bugs or glitches can often slip by the testing process and wind up in the final game. This is the reason that many games offer patches and post-release fixes for problems. You want to make sure your game is as clean as you can make it and that no errors exist that could hinder or cripple gameplay. Realistically, however, it’s likely that you won’t be able to think of everything before the project is released.

FINALIZING & RELEASING

Congratulations! You’ve made it through the course of production, and now it’s time to make your project available to customers. This time could prove to be busy, depending on the size of your project. At this point, your game could “go gold”, which means it’s being manufactured on CD, or your mod or project could be made available for download to the online community. Your project is officially finished, but the work isn’t over for the entire crew. You still need to support your game by creating and releasing game patches for any technical problems that come up. Plus, you want to continue promoting your game to the community!
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