Bug testing Dev Blog!

How do we make sure our game actually works? Short answer, you play it. Long answer you play it a lot and try things that don’t really make sense at the time.

The process of bug hunting or bug testing can be one of the funniest, depressing, dreaded and satisfying steps in the development. In addition to its wide range of emotions it scales directly with the size of your game. Thankfully our game is not huge, but nevertheless we wanted to get ahead on bug testing right away so we would have adequate time to fix any problems we came across. The simple idea of bug testing simply involves playing the game and recording what goes wrong, but that level of detail will not get you far for long.

When bug testing our game, I knew it would be important to include as much detail about the bug as possible to help us surgically change or remove the problem. So although we already had one spreadsheet for tracking and recording bugs, I made myself a personal one where I could add more detail to bugs I found without cluttering up the general use one.

I tried to collect information about the various states the player may be in when the bug was reported, for instance if the player was airborne or if it was a vessel specific problem. I also gave self a space for a longer description of the problem. With this column, it could be useful to go into unity and see if the problem repeats itself and record specific metrics about the vessels regarding position, and some of the booleans we have in place to help determine things like the ability to switch, if the vessels have line of sight to each other and so on.

After the bugs have been recorded/reported we put them on to our general sheet and flag them by importance and priority. Once the bugs are here we move forward with investigating them in more detail and after finding the problem we try to fix with caution as it is very easy to create more problems then you solve. Solving each problem could have a post in themselves, each is a lot of trial and error, speculation, and bargaining your soul with unity. The more important thing is communication, which is why we as a team make sure to update our bug list and inform each other of what we’re working on so nothing is interfering or done twice.

Hope you enjoyed this little peek into our game development. Be sure to check back later to see what we’re up to later this week!