As someone who's done QA, though not in game dev, I can really admire a good QA tester.
How much of the games are you allowed to tell other people?
Blogs > Nyarly |
obesechicken13
United States10467 Posts
As someone who's done QA, though not in game dev, I can really admire a good QA tester. How much of the games are you allowed to tell other people? | ||
JieXian
Malaysia4677 Posts
@@ you actually love debugging? I abhore that part :/ I'm like "AADFB@#$%&I&WQbe#%QT$^ wtf now WHAT ELSE IS WRONG WITH MY CODE??!?! " when I debug I'm happy for you to have found joy in your work | ||
Nyarly
France1030 Posts
On October 11 2014 11:56 obesechicken13 wrote: Yeah, speedrunners really get into games too. They just have that natural tendency to learn little details of the game. I don't think he's saying speedrunners are good QA testers because they are fast. As someone who's done QA, though not in game dev, I can really admire a good QA tester. How much of the games are you allowed to tell other people? Yep speedrunners are curious, this is a very good thing. During development, I basically can't say anything. When the game is announced, I'm allowed to say I'm working on it. When it's released, I'm allowed to say even more ! It's so hard to keep it all for yourself, so many easter eggs and hidden stuff... We almost triggered world war 3 not so long ago (on this, I cannot say more atm) On October 12 2014 05:17 JieXian wrote: Thanks for the reply! @@ you actually love debugging? I abhore that part :/ I'm like "AADFB@#$%&I&WQbe#%QT$^ wtf now WHAT ELSE IS WRONG WITH MY CODE??!?! " when I debug I'm happy for you to have found joy in your work Thank you too ! I love debugging because it makes me understand my code way better. You always think it works the way you want it to work, then you realise how it truly works, and be amazed. (atleast for me ) | ||
JieXian
Malaysia4677 Posts
On October 13 2014 16:24 Nyarly wrote: Show nested quote + On October 12 2014 05:17 JieXian wrote: Thanks for the reply! @@ you actually love debugging? I abhore that part :/ I'm like "AADFB@#$%&I&WQbe#%QT$^ wtf now WHAT ELSE IS WRONG WITH MY CODE??!?! " when I debug I'm happy for you to have found joy in your work Thank you too ! I love debugging because it makes me understand my code way better. You always think it works the way you want it to work, then you realise how it truly works, and be amazed. (atleast for me ) I get angry because I just want to get it to work but I keep failing haha However, you're right. I should have that mindset instead :D | ||
BreAKerTV
Taiwan1656 Posts
The one thing that always gets on my nerves is when I'm talking to someone in real life and they say, "I want to be a game tester." like they know the job inside and out before they've actually done it. It is often times the subject of ridicule in magazine or news articles. Imagine if you are someone who has never played any PC games before in his or her life and suddenly read, "I make 22,000 USD a year to test video games and make sure they work." as a headline article. I remember a nursing student told me, "Oh you just play the game, you find bugs, and you fill journals with notes on it." And I remember just sitting there, laughing at her because she doesn't know that game testers have to be able to fix the bugs that they find on the fly. An old friend of mine who used to work for Ion Storm told me this. That means the game testers in question must have programming knowledge. On top of that, I imagine most game testers are on temporary contracts / freelance, meaning they don't work at the office of the game developer in question. What good will taking notes do? Again, not attacking you, but the title "game tester" is an oxymoron to anyone who has knowledge of how the gaming industry works. To the industry newby it sounds easy because of the title. But more objectively, questions that I am genuinely curious about: Pay? How much can someone expect to make from legitimately testing a game? What kind of educational background is necessary? Is it really true that you have to fix game bugs on the fly? What are the best parts of the job and the worst parts of the job? | ||
-Kaiser-
Canada932 Posts
On October 22 2014 12:58 BreAKerTV wrote: Alright, so first and foremost I don't want the OP to take any of the somewhat cynical postings I have here personally and since he is a game tester, some of the questions I am genuinely curious about. Just remember, I am words on a computer screen, not someone trying to personally attack you. The one thing that always gets on my nerves is when I'm talking to someone in real life and they say, "I want to be a game tester." like they know the job inside and out before they've actually done it. It is often times the subject of ridicule in magazine or news articles. Imagine if you are someone who has never played any PC games before in his or her life and suddenly read, "I make 22,000 USD a year to test video games and make sure they work." as a headline article. I remember a nursing student told me, "Oh you just play the game, you find bugs, and you fill journals with notes on it." And I remember just sitting there, laughing at her because she doesn't know that game testers have to be able to fix the bugs that they find on the fly. An old friend of mine who used to work for Ion Storm told me this. That means the game testers in question must have programming knowledge. On top of that, I imagine most game testers are on temporary contracts / freelance, meaning they don't work at the office of the game developer in question. What good will taking notes do? Again, not attacking you, but the title "game tester" is an oxymoron to anyone who has knowledge of how the gaming industry works. To the industry newby it sounds easy because of the title. But more objectively, questions that I am genuinely curious about: Pay? How much can someone expect to make from legitimately testing a game? What kind of educational background is necessary? Is it really true that you have to fix game bugs on the fly? What are the best parts of the job and the worst parts of the job? Game testers at different companies do entirely different things. At a small company with 50 employees, you might be a programmer that is fixing problems getting paid $100k/year. If you're QA department at EA, where they have a 200 QA department alone, your job is to sit there for 10 hours a day on your cell phone and occasionally hit buttons on your controller for $15 an hour. "Game tester/QA" is a huge umbrella term, but generally speaking, if a company is large enough to have a dedicated QA department, most of the general contractors are unskilled labour for under $20 an hour in North America. | ||
Nyarly
France1030 Posts
On October 22 2014 12:58 BreAKerTV wrote: Alright, so first and foremost I don't want the OP to take any of the somewhat cynical postings I have here personally and since he is a game tester, some of the questions I am genuinely curious about. Just remember, I am words on a computer screen, not someone trying to personally attack you. The one thing that always gets on my nerves is when I'm talking to someone in real life and they say, "I want to be a game tester." like they know the job inside and out before they've actually done it. It is often times the subject of ridicule in magazine or news articles. Imagine if you are someone who has never played any PC games before in his or her life and suddenly read, "I make 22,000 USD a year to test video games and make sure they work." as a headline article. I remember a nursing student told me, "Oh you just play the game, you find bugs, and you fill journals with notes on it." And I remember just sitting there, laughing at her because she doesn't know that game testers have to be able to fix the bugs that they find on the fly. An old friend of mine who used to work for Ion Storm told me this. That means the game testers in question must have programming knowledge. On top of that, I imagine most game testers are on temporary contracts / freelance, meaning they don't work at the office of the game developer in question. What good will taking notes do? Again, not attacking you, but the title "game tester" is an oxymoron to anyone who has knowledge of how the gaming industry works. To the industry newby it sounds easy because of the title. But more objectively, questions that I am genuinely curious about: Pay? How much can someone expect to make from legitimately testing a game? What kind of educational background is necessary? Is it really true that you have to fix game bugs on the fly? What are the best parts of the job and the worst parts of the job? What the guy above me said should be quite true, a QA Tester's job strongly depends on the size of the company. So I'll answer from my point of view : Pay? How much can someone expect to make from legitimately testing a game? It's a real job, there are no freelance testers, and you usually don't hire testers for only one project (experience is very important for testers). There are test labs though, that you can contract for specific missions. We often call them for TRC/XR and Localization checks. Today, we hired four guys from Globalstep and Quanticlab (romanian and indian test labs) to help us with multiplayer connectivity So you can legitimately expect to earn the same money the average guy will make. But the pay depends if you work for a testlab (a lot), a small dev company (minimum), a bigger one (more than average), or for an editor (honest pay). I'm a bit above the national average and I work for an editor. What kind of educational background is necessary? Is it really true that you have to fix game bugs on the fly? There are no degrees or school for being a tester. But you need to know other games to be able to know what to expect. If your game is below the average in terms of framerate/texture quality, if it doesn't meet the general criteria (autosaves/settings/red is good green is bad/..), you need to notice it. Programing and every other skill is a bonus. But you don't have to fix the bugs on the fly, it's not part of a tester's job. You only identify bugs, and it's the dev's task to reproduce with your info and fix them. But I guess devs often have to test and fix bugs themselves in small studios. A dev once told me "please don't tell us your opinion on the issues, because we'll follow your idea, and might lose a lot of time looking at the wrong thing. Just tell us what you see, and how to do it again. We'll see where it comes from." What are the best parts of the job and the worst parts of the job? That's different for every tester, but to me : - Best part is testing, i love testing, finding bugs, and digging for infos. That's where i'm good at. - Worst part should be the random missions we have, like gameplay capture for agerating or trailers, because I don't know how to play like a common gamer. Or saying to devs "there's not enough time left, you should fix this and ignore this" To all people who don't know about testing, you can start saying testing isn't playing. It's a real job with repetitive tasks and long hours of work. You don't play the game, you might not even finish it before the release, the only reward you'll get is knowing you made a game a bit better for every player, but no one will see your work. What the girl said to you was pretty much right, we identify bugs and report them to the devs. There are testers at the dev studios to check the stability of the code additions, testers at editor companies that test the whole game, look for side effects and ensure the quality of the title, and testers in test labs for console requirements/hardware/loca checks. I hope I answered you right, I don't think I totally got your point, but I felt no offense | ||
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