Roles and Responsibilities
During the development of this project I was a QA Tester. Within that role I was responsible for:
- QA testing and reporting
- Creation of release materials such as advertising videos and high resolution image compositions
Development Breakdown
This title was a series of interlinked dungeons which players were challenged with progressing through.
To move from dungeon to dungeon players had to battle progressively tougher combatants, complete puzzles, and ensure they survived long enough to achieve these goals.
Quality Assurance Testing
QA testing on this title focused on the movement between dungeons, combat difficulty, puzzle clarity, and players having access to enough healing items and weaponry for success.
I approached puzzle clarity from a player centered and level design theory backed point of view. This meant I tested not only functionality but the clarity in terms of visual or audio confirmation that players had completed the objective within a dungeon.
To exemplify this idea, a dungeon featured switches which controlled the door for progression but these switches were in locations that obscured the view of what they controlled. To make the game response clearer to the player I logged this and suggested a fix which would put the game response to the player action in the line of sight of the player.
Functionality testing focused on repeat play tests of each puzzle, and the title as a whole to ensure that puzzles were allowing progression, could not be broken or skipped, and that the full experience was achievable without major bugs.
Combat testing focused on balancing the difficulty players were presented with in each dungeon against the resources they had at that point in play to address the threat. This was a highly iterative series of discussion between myself and the team responsible for developing the dungeons and required a high level of repeat testing to get right.
To test player survivability I play tested the build using progressively less food on each run through. This highlighted rooms which had too much healing items and those which had too little.
This form of testing also highlighted unforeseen difficulty in some combat encounters and as such resulted in further balancing changes.
