How to be a Games Tester
This is a commonly asked question with surprisingly little resources for information available. There are a few sites such as Only4Gamers which will provides information on testing and a list of jobs that are available for a membership fee. However, similar information is already readily available freely but is just scattered across several sites. I am writing the this article to consolidate all the freely available information into one place so aspiring testers do not have to resort to paying for information, that in my opinion should be free.
Playing games for money? Awesome, right?
Games Testing is sometimes referred to as ‘Getting paid to play games’ and from that, it sounds like an awesome job. After all, most (if not all) aspiring testers play games every day, why not get paid to play them? The reason is because the quote is wrong, testers are not being paid to play games, they are being paid to test them and that is the crucial difference. Playing games involves choosing the games you want to play and playing them the way you want to play. Games testing involve neither of these. Testers are assigned games to test and will need to play the games according to test scripts. To give a real life example, the article ‘Testing Video Games Can’t Possibly Be Hardware Than an Afternoon With Xbox’ describes a tester’s short experience on the job at Volt. The article doesn’t exactly paint a pretty picture. Games testing is effectively the minimal wage job of the games industry and the turnover of staff is the largest out of all departments in development. People get promoted, leave on their accord, get fired or are made redundant. Whatever you do, don’t expect to get rich just ‘playing’ games via games testing.
Automated Testing: Building A Flexible Game Solver »
Interesting article on using an AI script to ‘solve’ complete a game and be used for automated testing. I have been looking into this type of thing myself and researching if it would be possible to write one for the games I am working on at Playfish using something like Sikuli as the player.
However, for it to be useful as an automated tester, it would need to be able to pick up on crashes and where the player would be stuck and report to a server/email the developers on where and how it happened.
