Welcome to this comprehensive game testing tutorial, where we delve into the intricacies of effective testing techniques.
We are very happy to help you embark on an epic journey on the topic to help you to uncover secrets, conquer bugs, and master the art.
So, get ready to level up your game testing skills!
Let’s go.
Introduction to a Beginner’s Guide to Game Testing
There are several benefits of going through game testing tutorials as a preparation stage in your testing journey.
As a beginner, you will come across some complex challenges that will demand strategic approaches in order to over come them. The knowledge gained from game testing tutorials will play a vital role in helping you to navigate your way and stay ahead of the curve.
It is very important to know this. The testing stage of game development plays pivotal roles for the success of any game’s post launch performance. It is the final step before a game is released and allows developers to identify any issues that may arise during gameplay.
Testing also helps developers ensure that their product meets all quality standards and provides an enjoyable experience for them.
We will love to add this for you in this game testing tutorials. Game testing involves a lot of trial and error, as well as feedback from testers who play the game in order to find bugs or problems with the game.
It requires a great deal of patience and attention to detail, but it can make all the difference between a successful launch and one that fails due to technical issues or poor user experience.
These are the more reasons why you need the best game testing tutorials to help you improve your app’s performance.
You may alternatively keep an eye on a beginner’s guide to game testing to learn about the fundamentals and best practices.
Who Is a Game Tester and Why Does He Need Game Testing Techniques and Tips?
To say the least here, game testers are like the unsung heroes of the gaming industry. They are employed by game development companies to test video games before they are released to the public.
Game testers play a vital role in ensuring that the game is bug-free and meets all the quality standards set by the company. They also provide feedback on how well a game plays, its graphics, sound effects, and other features.
Game testers use the best game testing techniques and tips to perform game testing for enhanced user experience.
Game testing companies offer specialized services to ensure that a game is ready for launch. To achieve this, the game testers follow step-by-step game testing processes.
As a game tester, you will need to improve your game testing skills and follow trends in the industry. Learning new skills from comprehensive game testing tutorials can help you in improving your game testing techniques.
Game Testing Best Practices: What Does a Games Tester Do?
Now that you have read up this game testing tutorial to this level, it’s time to see what game testers do.
Game testing is a critical part of the game development process.
Games testers ensure that games are free from bugs and glitches and meet the quality standards set by the game developers. They also provide feedback to the developers about how to improve the game’s overall design and gameplay.
Game testers usually work for a game testing company or as independent contractors. They test different aspects of a game such as its graphics, sound, controls, level design, and more.
They are familiar with all aspects of gaming to accurately assess each aspect of a game and provide feedback on it.
Game testers communicate effectively with developers and other team members to address any issues properly before releasing the final version of a game. With their help, developers can ensure that their games will be enjoyable for players around the world.
It is a game testing best practices that testers are knowledgeable about the game and its mechanics. They must think like the ideal players and envision all possible scenarios that during gameplay.
In this section of our game testing tutorial, you should always remember this.
Game testing companies employ experienced professionals who have an eye for detail. They strive to make sure every aspect of the game works as intended. The goal is that players can enjoy an immersive experience without any technical issues or glitches.
Step-by-step Game Testing Process: The Key Game Tester Responsibilities?
We would like to inform you about the key responsibilities of game testing in this section of our game testing tutorial
Game testers are responsible for finding and reporting any bugs or issues in a game before it is released to the public.
They play the game multiple times, looking for any glitches or problems that could cause the game to malfunction.
They also provide feedback on how to improve the gameplay experience.
In addition, they may be asked to test new features and content before they are added to the final version of a game. As such, game testers have excellent problem-solving skills and can work independently with little supervision.
Step-by-step Game Testing Process
On all platforms, the game development cycle comprises segments known as milestones. The milestones indicate that the game has reached a certain stage of development. Typically, the milestones are: first playable, alpha phase, beta phase, gold phase, and post-release phase.
The initial playable version is similar to a demo version in that the game’s feel is observed and reviewed.
For the sake of this game testing tutorial, testing is used to identify issues in the game so that they may be fixed.
There are two sorts of tests and testing: black-box testing and clear-box testing. Their testing goal and basic processes are minimal (e.g., test planning, test design, testing execution, regression testing, and issue reporting), but their purpose emphasizes different aspects of the game. Let’s find out what those methods are;
Black Box Testing
It focuses on the game’s playability or functional components. For example, evaluating the user interface (e.g., the use of buttons and selection menus), the “look and feel” (e.g., the designs and animation), and the actual gaming.
For Black Box testing, the game tester must understand how to play the game, how to use the controller, and understand the game flow and rules.
Clear Box Testing
It focuses on the game software’s design and integration. For example, the use of a database, pipelines, the integration/reconciliation of game segments such as the AI engine, the rendering engine, sound, and so on.
The game tester must understand code in order to do Clear Box testing. The Software Tester uses a run-time troubleshooting environment to encourage the code or sections of code with input, such as changing variables, data, and so on, and analyses the test results.
Types of Game Bugs in Game Testing
Crashes
In this game testing tutorial, we identify crashes as one of the most prevalent problems. This occurs when a player requests that the video game execute an action that it was not planned to accomplish or that the creators did not anticipate, and the app crashes.
This problem can be caused by different factors. In reality, the technological options are so many that it takes a lot of creative thinking to uncover and duplicate faults that cause a video game to crash, as well as pinpoint with accuracy what’s causing the problem.
Collision Engine bugs
The second identified type of bugs in this game testing tutorial is collision engine bug.
video game This is a pretty typical fault in 3D-modeled settings. It occurs when players may traverse to locations that are not meant to be accessible like when they pass walls and doors.
It also manifests when objects and other characters may be crossed as if they weren’t there. None of which are typical events intended by the makers, unless the purpose is to make the player feel like they are in some type of disembodied existence.
Otherwise, material collision is anticipated to function as it does in real life. This error arises when developers or designers overlook something while delimiting zones and objects.
This can ruin the game experience when players become imprisoned in an area/item, or when an unseen barrier stops the player from properly traversing scenarios. At times, the player might witness his character plummeting into the nothingness.
Navigation Bugs
This game testing tutorial identifies also navigation bugs in video games because they sometimes break. Sometimes game menus are coded improperly, resulting in a button leading to the wrong menu.
A menu being unavailable, or the player becoming stuck in a menu from which he cannot depart.
This is frequently due to logical issues with the navigation programming, which causes an unintended operation to perform or block itself.
Gameplay bugs
A gameplay glitch occurs when a videogame fails to perform an action that it is supposed to perform according to the game rules. It also occurs when it performs an action in an unexpected manner.
While we were putting this game testing tutorial together, we observe that it manifests itself in literally infinite ways. Like when an element does not behave as it should in the context provided to the player.
Elements that should be destroyable but are not (or vice versa), actions with unintended consequences, or tools and weapons that have no effect on enemies or the environment. It’s not uncommon to hear things like “the adversary is bugged” or “the weapon is bugged,” and so on.
This indicates that the game is not performing as expected in terms of that particular gameplay feature.
Freezes
Our game testing tutorial research also found freezes as a common bug.
It activates when the videogame is not programmed to accomplish anything the player requests, and the game just freezes.
It is quite similar to the crash bug, and is frequently put in the same category. It can arise for a variety of reasons, as with every problem, but one of the most prevalent is memory overflow. In this situation, the problem is with the videogame’s minimal system requirements.
Another common cause of freezes is when the videogame employs asynchronism in task execution and when one job waits for another to finish, but the last task fails or does not finish.
This is especially prevalent when working with data that has been downloaded from a server.
InGame Purchase Bugs
This is a serious problem since consumers might get extremely dissatisfied and upset when their purchases are not acknowledged by the app. Of course, people paid for the game, yet it failed to deliver on its promises.
In our game testing tutorial research for bugs, this arises in a variety of forms and for a variety of causes. But the three most prevalent are as follows:
The game crashes during a transaction, but it does not acknowledge the purchase even after it has been charged.
The video game prevents an item from being purchased again because it detects that it has previously been purchased, even if the purchase did not occur.
The video game does not enable the user to buy an item displayed in the shop since the item is not registered in the app store, but it is programmed to be displayed in the video game store.
Visual bugs
Also, we found visual bugs as a common bug during our comprehensive game testing tutorial research. It happens when a video game fails to display its images as planned.
The issue is with the graphic processing unit’s (GPU) speed, or when the specific GPU of the device is incompatible with the way the game has been developed.
Other causes are simpler to resolve, such as when texture files were wrongly labelled, preventing the game from loading them when needed.
Sound bugs
Bugs in sound effects and music can take various forms. A sound maybe too high or too low in an unexpected way. A sound effect or music plays at the incorrect time, or it continues to play in a loop.
Sometimes it’s because the game is looking for a sound file that has an erroneous name. For example, suppose a player interacts with an element that includes a sound, but the sound continues to play in a loop after the context has passed.
Update bugs
Nowadays, all videogames are updated by downloading them immediately from the Internet. However, developers are occasionally forced to update so frequently that a videogame ceases to be lucrative.
While putting this game testing tutorial together, we noticed that some updates can ruin a game. For example, when they delete saved data, make certain aspects unavailable in a game-breaking fashion, or cause the game to crash.
This sort of problem is fixed with fresh updates and patches that address issues caused by prior releases.
This usually results in extremely irate people and very negative reviews. It is critical to always do a QA Pass on many devices with varying degrees of game advancement whenever an update is to be pushed.
Saving bugs
A fairly common saving error is merely the saving of settings rather than game progress. Players are frustrated because they are forced to update their settings every time, they run the game.
Loading Resources bugs
When a videogame loads its resources, it may do it erroneously, in the wrong spot, in mid-air, below the floor, or not at all.
This type of bug with disguised loadings is fairly common when a player crosses from one area to the next, and as the videogame loads the new area. It misses some resources because it didn’t have enough time to do so, which happens in games where the player can move faster than the loading time.
Or, even more game breaking, when the player’s character loads within an item, or in a circumstance where death is guaranteed, such as a free fall, or in the middle of an impossible task.
Text Localization bugs
Games typically include text, and there are several difficulties that can arise from writing, ranging from the archaic misspelling to terrible grammar concerns that are not unique to videogames.
These issues are often identified by specialized QA teams (QA Localization teams) that are fluent in a variety of languages. In reality, it is customary for QA Localization to be handled by the same team that first translated the game into other languages.
However, because excellent translations may be costly, many mobile games presently do not claim to offer them. Instead, their purpose is for the game to just be “understandable”.
As a result, they regularly employ automatic translation systems such as Google Translate. Using a QA Localization crew for a Google-translated game becomes overkill in such circumstances.
However, text localization flaws might be more serious than misspellings or grammatical errors.
Indeed, certain languages have special characters that the game may not support (and the game may simply display squares instead of letters), while others necessitate varying text lengths for the same display area.
When this happens, the text becomes unaligned or too large or tiny for the screen display, rendering it illegible.
This is the major reason why having individuals on the QA team check the game in several languages is always a smart idea. Even if they do not comprehend the language, they will be able to identify some of these issues.
Game Testing Techniques and Tips
In this game testing tutorial, we will like to share some game testing techniques and tips.
There are two types of test cases: one that analyses the game’s functioning and is known as Positive Testing. The other is known as Negative Testing, and it involves examining the game’s durability and amount of resilience resistance (it is also called load testing or stress testing).
“Negative” test scenarios are created with “banging the game” as the highest priority. As a result, the game tester will test for unusual scenarios and determine whether or not the game understands how to react and responds efficiently.
Combinatorial Testing
Combinatorial testing is a technique of experimental design that is used for commercial software testing and the creation of test cases.
Combinatorial testing for game testing enhances test performance efficiency, produces high-quality results, lowers costs, and ensures accurate phase containment.
Using this test, every potential sequence of parameter values is incorporated. Parameter options include game components, functions, events, character traits, play options, settings, customization options, and so on.
Compatibility Testing
The majority of game programming is done on laptops or PCs. Regardless, several games may be designed for various devices such as smartphones, gaming consoles, communicators, and so on.
Game creation is done in these devices’ test systems; however, the results might differ greatly from the original. As a result, upon starting the game on the original device, a few issues may develop later on.
Furthermore, programming authorization should be carefully considered. If there are any errors, the game can be returned for rectification, which takes more time and costs money. As a result, it is critical to determine whether the game meets the requirements of the devices.
Functional Testing
Its goal is more likely to detect departures from functioning needs. It all boils down to driving through the game repeatedly, identifying flaws and the situations in which they may be fixed.
Stress or Load Testing
Stress or Load Testing: As a result, the game tester may test system execution in adverse conditions. Load testing makes it easier to identify and correct potentially dangerous code portions in real time.
Test for unusual scenarios, such as loading the game with no memory card, then running the game for 48 hours to see how it behaves
Feature Testing
This testing is carried out to ensure that the game’s features function properly. Detail test cases are more suited to addressing distinct characteristics.
Task-based experiments need a high degree of detail. When there is a variety of features for various player states, test frameworks become more convenient and effective.
Ad hoc Testing
Ad hoc testing is also referred to as generic testing at times. It is a less structured test. Ad hoc testing allows the game tester to examine avenues based on instinct.
Ad hoc testing is classified into two categories.
The first is free testing, which involves testing a game without any planning or documentation.
Another type of testing is direct testing, which is a solo test performed spontaneously to answer a specific topic.
Trees for testing
A test tree is a usability technique for sorting out test cases that aids in the selection of a suitable collection of tests for a specific code modification configuration.
Test Tree improves overall understanding of complex game qualities and deals with potentially complex functions, especially when these functions interact with other game principles, elements, and functions.
The test tree is created by dividing the items into subsets till the bottom nodes identify which elements to use or specify during game testing.
Critical Path Test
Crucial route testing is a method for identifying critical paths in a game. This sort of testing approach identifies the circumstances that lead to disappointments.
Smoke Testing
It is used to put a new CD burn to the test. The term “Smoke Testing” comes from an engineering facility that tests new automotive engines.
Before putting a new engine on the road, the engineers would just start it and see if it runs. If smoke came out of the engine, they’d know right away that a few parts weren’t working properly.
The game tester will simply run the game, and if it continues to crash, the tester will know that a few portions are faulty.
Regression Testing
This form of game testing is used to retest the product’s unchanged elements. Here, test cases are re-checked to ensure that the previous portions of the application are still operational and that new modifications have not introduced any new errors or vulnerabilities.
Play Test
Play testing is a technique used by game testers to break down non-useful characteristics such as fun variables, balance, difficulty levels, and so on. To test the work process, a selected crew of testers plays the game’s unfinished variations.
Limitation testing
The games are frequently translated into the languages of the countries where they are expected to be sold. It is common for translators to be unable to provide a perfectly accurate interpretation that is completely consistent with game events.
Indeed, even if correctly read, it may not reflect the situation and may grate on the ears of local speakers. As a result, following localization, it is beneficial to test the game with locals of the countries where the ultimate game will be offered.
Multiplayer Testing
Multiplayer testing is an altogether different beast. Throughout the game, several players interact with the game world, gaming servers, PC-controlled opponents, and one other. Such large numbers have the potential to be disastrous.
Furthermore, it frequently necessitates a whole team of game testers, several difficult risk-based judgments, and the need to devote indefinite amounts of time and energy testing alternative scenarios.
Understanding multiplayer game settings and how to test well as a group is necessary knowledge for this type of game testing approach.
Sound Testing
Sound testing is prevalent in all items that produce sound or play media. However, games have unique aspects that other software does not need to examine to the same extent.
Game music should immerse the player in the game and improve the gameplay. Not only should the sound play without missing or shuttering components, but it should also contribute to the gameplay. This necessitates broad sound abilities as well as a specific understanding of gaming audio.
In conclusion
We hope you enjoy our blog post on beginner’s guide to game testing. game testing tutorial. We have discussed the important aspects of game testing. We discussed game testing techniques and tips and the step-by-step game testing process.
We have also touched on the types of bugs to look out for in game testing and the game testing best practices.
Thank you for reading our game testing tutorial. We wish you all the best in your game testing journey.
You can always reach out to us for any assistance or help.
