by Mit ThakkarMultiplayer networking, physics and realism, and API integration are all present in contemporary games. Honorable mentions go to the game businesses and developers of the game testing company, who give their best to produce engaging and user-friendly online games. But there’s no denying that they are some of the most complex software expressions ever created. It is a dynamic source that keeps the audience interested and entertained.
Hence you cannot simply use standard software testing procedures to test them. Naturally, the most basic understanding of testing is to find bugs. Developers can eliminate those using technologies like title publishing, mass server loading, level architecture, and sophisticated user experience.
What is Video Game Quality Assurance?
To satisfy your end users’ needs, you must ensure the quality of your video games. Your internet games are sophisticated and intricate with an efficient goal. The game development lifecycle requires the most rapidly growing software sector in terms of functionality, design, usability, scalability, robustness, and reliability.
Empower your customers by giving them assurance to find bugs and work with developers to fix them. The game design must be without any redundancy and requires integration into your agile process without any issues.
Video Games QA Testing Services and Its Importance in Game Development
- Get rid of any flaws or errors in the game that could have a negative, immediate effect on the gamer.
- Removing any mistakes or poor-quality visuals.
- Mistakes or graphics of poor quality.
- On each device, examine your game for any errors.
- It is simple to identify the complex layouts from screenshots.
So, before the game is officially released, testers for video games use quality assurance approaches to test the game.
Game testing can take two different forms. Both Black-Box and White-Box testing apply to them.
- Black box testing’s main objective is to assess several areas of overall playability, such as the graphical user interface, user experience, or any visual look. Menus, graphic elements, special effects, and animations are just a few examples of functional and UI elements evaluated similarly.
- The main goal of white box testing is the integration of systemic elements like audio players, graphics/game engines, and so on. The same framework also helps you test the architectural integration of external entities, including databases, social media, and third-party components.
Layout of Quality Assurance Testing Services
Specification of the Required Action: In this phase, an acknowledgment of a GDD is required (Game Design Document). The review process considers the game’s presentation and gameplay and data gathered via practice and experimentation.
Validation Plan: This process ensures device fragmentation and entails developing a comprehensive master plan for the entire system. It provides that the already-built software is familiar with the most recent developments in the video game industry’s trends and standards.
Test Documentation: During this stage, there is an equal distribution of tasks and responsibilities to each member of the game development team and QA consulting services. The roadmap integrates new pieces of player feedback and suggestions into the action of the game.
Also Read – How To Build An Effective Game Testing Strategy?
Guaranteeing Products of High Quality: To ensure that the end-user, also known as a gamer or player, receives a video game product of high quality, fixes any visual faults, and handles any coding errors.
Plan for the Improvement of Quality: To improve the functionality of the software that is currently in place, carry out the required adjustments by inspecting the game build, testing it, and looking for faults.
Among a game tester of QA consulting, many duties and responsibilities are the following:
- Requirements of the game rules need to be classified before they can be studied and analyzed.
- It identifies the requirements of the system and the users for the file structure and its dependencies.
- It identifies assets dependent on other parts of the game’s overall flow and architecture.
- Determine the overarching concept of the game as well as its practical requirements, such as design and camera view, etc.
Diving Into the Details of Game Performance Testing
1. Examination of the localization
When you hear “global,” you should understand that your game needs to be “local” for everyone. It makes it easier to make technical corrections and review the work carried out by translating game scripts. At the same time, those scripts are being translated into numerous languages and tested with devices that speak those languages.
In this section, the problem layouts need selection with relative ease from screenshots. It ensures that the game’s localization is accurate and of high quality. With the assistance of cloud-based device access and test automation, even you will be able to repeat the same test runs over and over again.
2. Evaluation of performance
During the game’s testing, it is essential to check the performance in general. Customers have increasingly voiced dissatisfaction with issues such as network coverage, memory leakage, low memory, low battery, and the amount of time it takes to download programs. The utilization of the device ecosystem, as well as the fundamental requirements of the game, should be satisfactory under a variety of different heavy loads on a variety of devices.
Additionally, the QA testing company testers examine mobile devices’ connectivity with either data centers or the cloud. It is essential to evaluate the application’s client-side and its server in terms of performance, throughput, stability, and scalability.
Also Read – Different Stages of Game Testing
3. Examination of functionality
Functionality QA testers look for generic issues inside the game and are often associated with manual testing and “playing the game through.” Testing User Interactions, User Interfaces, and Transactions involves a fundamental understanding of programming and the ability to set up an environment specifically for testing.
Testing the user interface verifies the proper game flow and mechanism and the stability of the user interface (as well as the graphics), which contributes to the game’s user-friendliness. The integration of graphical assets helps resolve problems with game mechanics and stability and improves the integrity of game assets.
4. Examination of compatibility
During each stage of production, it examines the game on various platforms to determine whether or not it is compatible with those platforms. It is feasible to help uncover incompatibility issues with different game device variants’ hardware or software. Integrations are carried out with the physical devices themselves, even if end users may employ various hardware and software combinations.
5. Multiplayer Capabilities and User Options
Connectivity in games is crucial, mainly when the round must communicate with the backend server. Synchronizing the backend with the devices is essential to make the multiplayer/user feature as easy to use as possible. Testing a multiplayer game requires the other end to behave like a genuine counterpart, which is something that cannot be done on a desktop computer using a mouse and keyboard. Put away your emulators and start testing with actual devices instead. For instance, performance lags are straightforward to identify when using existing devices.
Also Read – Detailed Mobile Game Testing Checklist
6. Integrations of society, concerns about safety, and potential risks
Nearly all game creators incorporate at least some open-source components into their games. It helps you better to understand the games’ functioning and ease of use. The game QA tester must rigorously validate the highly recommended and well-acknowledged development practice within the context of actual Android and iOS devices. Generating code for functionalities in your mobile game that is not essential can be simplified thanks to differences in operating system versions and device specifications.
Unlocking the Importance of Game QA and Testing Via Suitable Examples
Imagine if the industry that manufactures automobiles does not cut corners on the product’s quality. It is impossible to confirm that the processes adhere to the standard of quality assurance testers are not explicitly assigned to the project. Therefore, the automobile sector would be unable to run correctly without quality assurance personnel who can check that everything is operating as expected.
Because any subsequent functional flaws, such as bugs and errors, can cause significant harm to consumers early in the software development life cycle. Assembly workers cannot do their responsibilities faultlessly due to irregularities, redundancies, and defects while guaranteeing the product’s quality.
Considering another example – when a writer submits the assigned articles to a newspaper for publication, they are subjected to several rounds of editorial review to ensure that they adhere to a predetermined set of facts and rules.
If these articles were to be published without first being reviewed and edited, they would contain numerous grammatical errors and typos, and the material would lose the trust gained. As a result, the article reviewers maintain a solid working relationship with the teams responsible for developing the article content and the products.
Wrapping Up
The quality control and testing procedures in video games are analogous to those used in software development. Because it is impossible to fix everything, this is not an easy job! However, to release a bug-free version of your game, you will need to fix any problems in it.
As a game tester, the most necessary thing to pay attention to is the work you are doing for the benefit of other players’ enjoyment and ease. Because the purpose of any game studio is to provide its audience with exciting and thrilling games that they can play without interruptions, these games should not require any payment to access.
