This week we had a guest lecture from Venny a Southampton alumni working at Sumo Games. The talk revolved around playtesting and how to get the most out of a session.
QA(Quality Assurance)
- Career path
- focuses on tech issues
- fixing what goes wrong
Vs
User Testing
- Observing natural behaviours of players
- Not necessarily only looking for bugs but rather what the players are drawn to and do
Smoke Testing
A smoke test is where you check that the most fundamental parts of your build are working. If the build does not pass the test the build is unusable.
Using an Excel spreadsheet to conduct the smoke test. Each test should be put in separate sheets with a clearly marked date and time. You then list the features you want to test, the expected outcome and the actual outcome. If the expected and actual outcomes are different then there is a problem.
How to Write Bug Reports
- Short description of bug
- reproduction of the steps
- observed outcome (what is actually happening)
- expected outcome ( what should be happening)
Running a User Test
Step 1 – paper prototype, the quickest and easiest way to see if a mechanic could work
Step 2 – greybox prototype, only to test usability and flow, do not make it look nice or pretty
Step 3 – bring in players who have no knowledge of the game, ask open ended questions
Step 4 – analyse the results from the session. Pay close attention to the behaviour of the player are they apathetic is the UI legible and are they enjoying something unexpected
Step 5 – Iterate the design and repeat steps 3 and 4 take feedback forward and implement the changes, make it radically different
Step 6 – UI skinning, in engine implementation of art assets, now is the time to make it look pretty
On Tuesday we had our weekly meeting as it was Chinese New Year some members of the team were absent. I focused on painting the final version of the character.
On Thursday we had a session on AI usage and the universities policy. After an informative talk about how generative AI is structured and works our groups were given examples of different case studies. Our groups stance on AI is luckily aligned to be strict no AI.
Next Steps –
As we have the first player testing session next week I am going to focus on animating the characters idle and movement animations
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