Название: Game Testing: All in One, 4th Edition Автор: Robert Denton Bryant Издательство: Mercury Learning and Information Год: 2024 Страниц: 431 Язык: английский Формат: pdf (true), epub (true) Размер: 38.2 MB, 47.9 MB
An updated version of the bestselling, Game Testing All In One 3/E, this fourth edition serves as your comprehensive handbook to video game testing, guiding you through the essential skills needed to succeed in this exciting field. Whether you are a student seeking to enter the video game industry or a working professional aiming to refine your skills, this new edition gives you the basic skills of testing, demonstrates how game testing and testers fit into the game development process, and includes practical knowledge of tools, roles, responsibilities, and the metrics used to determine game quality and test progress. The reader is taken step-by-step through test design and other QA methods, using real game situations, and featuring interviews with veteran game developers. The book includes companion files for downloading with templates and tutorials for creating both combinatorial tables and test flow diagrams, which form the basis of a robust video game QA plan. Each chapter includes questions and exercises, making the book suitable for classroom use as well as a personal study or reference tool.
Programmers make the video game work. They use their programming skills to turn the game design into something you can play on your computer or other device. When unexpected problems arise, they are quick to fix them with their problem-solving skills. They also know the details of the software tools used to make the game, which helps them to improve performance and fix tricky bugs. The members of this team may call themselves programmers, engineers, coders, scripters, or developers. (This last term is falling out of use, however, since anyone who works for a game development company can be considered a game developer.) They produce the code that the testers must test before the game can be released. Their job involves translating the gameplay, artwork, sound, and story of the game into programming language. This code is subsequently converted into a game program that players run on their devices. Programmers may be involved in the porting of game code from one platform to another. Certain portions of the code should remain the same, whereas others must be changed to accommodate differences in the new platform. In all cases, the port must be freshly tested on the new platform to ensure that the player’s experience is the same as on the original platform.
Developers do not fully test their own games. They do not have time to, and even if they did, it is not a good idea, for reasons that will become clear later in the book. At the beginning of the video game era, the programmer of the game was also its artist, designer, and tester. Even though games were very small (the size of a modern email message), the programmers spent most of their time designing and programming; they spent very little time testing. If they did any testing, it was based on their own assumptions about how players would play the game. The following section illustrates the type of problem these assumptions can create.
Features: Features test methodology tutorials based on actual games, plus examples and tools that readers can use for personal or professional development Explores documented methods and tools for tracking and managing game testing progress and game quality Provides companion files available for digital download, including classroom support files, templates, resources, and projects from the book