Week 4 Update (Beta Testing)
Hey there! This post is part of a game testing project I am working on. There’s a lot more to it than what is covered in this post so check out the full project here.
Using Google Play Store to find open beta games, I focused exclusively on mobile game testing this week. The results were interesting to say the least. Testing games using your phone is an entirely different ballpark. While plenty of bugs were discovered, I wasn’t able to accurately report most of them for reasons I’ll explain below.
The games I tested
NOTE: The following are brief overviews of what I shared with the games’ developers.
- Doom Simulator
- A narrative game that sets the player in a post-apocalyptic world. While no control is given to the player in regards to physical movements, he will have to make narrative choices based on the scenarios he encounters on his journey. A fun idea, but the game was plagued by bugs and horrendous framerate issues.
2. Blocky World — Fantasy Quest
- A grid based adventure game where the player must defeat all enemies within a room in order to move forward. Not exactly deep, but the graphics were charming and the idea is good for short play sessions. The touch pad controls combined with the camera angle did cause a few issues though.
3. Umbra: Amulet of Light
- A puzzle game where the player must drag and rotate various blocks to make their collective shadow match the shape on the wall. A very neat and satisfying game! Much like the previous game though, the camera and touch controls made gameplay irritating at times.
How it went
Testing games on the Google Play Store was very different from G.Round. Given that these games were made for and tested on a phone, controls were almost always a problem. The touch screen didn’t always respond properly or work very well in 3D environments.
Another challenge I encountered was in regard to Doom Simulator’s bugs. The game was mostly automated. I would make a decision and the player character would carry it out. That being said, death was a common occurrence as per the nature of the game. And every set of scenarios encountered were randomly generated.
Because of the randomness of the gameplay, I was unable to replicate any bugs I encountered (and there were quite a few).
When creating a game that is randomly generated, testers need to have at least some way to control the spontaneous nature of the game. Bugs can appear for a variety of different reasons. So in a game like Doom Simulator, accuracy can only be maintained if the chaos is controlled.
- Umbra: Amulet of Light Bug Reports
The last challenge I encountered was the ads. The Google Play Store does allow people to play open beta games, but it is not an official testing platform. Because of this, ads were rampant while I tried out new games.
Every one or two short minutes of gameplay got interrupted by advertisements of around the same length. It made testing much more difficult. They were so frequent that if I didn’t know better, I might have thought that I was playing on a website filled with viruses.
It also proved to be jarring. Removing my focus from the task at hand (finding bugs) forced me to reconcentrate once the ad finally ended.
I understand the need for ads in a mobile game (especially if it’s free) but constant interruptions made me not want to play anymore. I think a better way to implement them would be to make them a part of the gameplay. For example, offer a reward to the player for watching one like in Tsuki’s Odyssey.
What I learned
- The more complex or random a game, the more difficult it is to isolate a bug case without special tools
- Effective game testing requires unbroken concentration
The game plan going forward
That wraps up up this project! Does that mean I’m done testing games? Absolutely not! I am a game tester after all. I’ll continue business as usual (with G.Round more than the Google Play Store most likely) and look for additional platforms to help developers refine their games.
