Games Testing

December 08, 2020

Games Testing

For this week's reading task, I started off reading the 1st article that was given which was about the seven different types of game testing techniques - https://dzone.com/articles/7-different-types-of-game-testing-techniques. I found this article very easy to read informative. I found out there is many different ways to test games and make sure that they work properly. In this article we are told that there's many risks to game testing such as the game might have what the player is looking for, there might be an element of form that is missing from the game, the game might not include a player centric design, the game may not be unique or may not be competitive enough, the app may fail because of technical issues or broken features and this would be a problem when testing the game and it's important when testing a game to make sure that it has easy to use features and gameplay. In the article we are told that there are 7 popular game testing techniques, and these are:

1. Functionality Testing

2. Combinatorial Testing

3. Ad Hoc Testing

4. Compatibility Testing

5. Clean Room and Tree Testing

6. Regression testing

7. Performance Testing

Game testing is very important when in an industry that is so broad and it's important to follow out these tests so that the game developer can fix any errors and just make their game work properly.

After reading the article I went on to watch the YouTube video, the video showed me how to play test- https://youtu.be/b9U1dcUS_-w what I learned from this video was that you can never test your game too early and it's important to find out the errors or what your game lacks early on rather than when you think you have a final game. The YouTube video tells you got you should user test as soon as you have a prototype. It is said in the game that it doesn't matter who you get to test your game because anyone can give feedback, but it says that the best candidates to test your game would be kids because they would be brutally honest and tell as it is. It is said to make sure that your user testing is very broad and that you got people from who are experienced with games to non-gamers. The video also like the article talks you through many different ways that you can test again. it specifies that is important to interview the player after to see what they liked about the game what they found hard about the game what they would change.

It is really important to game test your game to detect flaws early on rather than create your whole game and have to go back and stare from scratch because you find out that your game is too difficult or is missing an element of fun. Play-testing can be done in many different ways and these articles have given me a lot of information about how I would go about doing that.