Game Testing

This week's article talks about game testing - very important part in making a game. After you have designed your game, its time to test it. At first, you test it yourself, but you, as the designer, know exactly what to do and how to do, so instead, you send your game off to people.

There are different types of testing:
Bug Testing (or Quality Assurance) - The purpose of QA is to find errors in the game’s behavior relative to its design.

Focus Testing - In a focus test, you bring together players that are part of the target audience’s demographic in order to determine how well a game serves their needs. This is normally done for marketing purposes.

Usability Testing - In a usability test, players are given specific tasks to accomplish in an attempt to see whether they understand how to control the game.

Balance Testing - The purpose of this kind of test is to identify imbalances in the game so that the designer can fix them.

Fun Testing - A game can be usable, balanced and functional and still be uninteresting. That elusive “fun factor” may be hard to design intentionally, but when people are playing the game it is pretty obvious whether they are having fun or not.

After this, the article mentions that at first, you test the game yourself. Then, if you are lucky enough to know any skilled game designers, you send it up to them to see if they can spot any flaws or exploits. After that, you give the game to people you know - friends, family and so on - so they can test the actual game play. Next step is gamers who usually are complete strangers. 

Source
Overall, I liked this article but it was quite long, and I only skimmed through the last two pages of it because I ran out of reading time for it. 

The next article is about constructive criticism, which I have already done for one of my previous posts, so it's not a new concept to me... I have always tried to give that type of criticism if I have to give feedback to someone.


Also, here are some interesting links related to the topic of the reading:
https://gametester.co - Website for game testers.
Playtesting - 3 Best Practices for Playtesting.
Big companies like Ubisoft and EA are hiring gamers who would try their games for free... 

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