Quality assurance

One thing must be immediately clarified: QA doesn’t happen in the final phase only. It must start as soon as a game design becomes software.

Postponing QA to a later stage, or not having QA testers embedded in the game development team from the start is a common reason for the final 10% becoming 80%.

We are including QA in this chapter because it is a critical part of any game project’s closure and certain QA passes can only be done once the game is complete. It is only at this stage that a game can get the so-called Gold Master status, which means there is a build of the game that has passed all the publisher’s and platform’s requirements and has a bug rate below a certain threshold. Remember? We talked about the Gold Master in the first chapter of this book, Chapter 1, Introducing the Game Production Process.

There are different methodologies for game testing, each dedicated to a particular area of the game.

Most of them are...