Odysseus Kosmos – Developer Diaries #13

Hey there, friends! Welcome back on board of “San Francisco”, a huge spacecraft travelling far, far way from planet Earth.
Today I am going to talk about the testing of our game, and what we consider “good quality” for the project.
I already explained how the game works from the inside. Here is a quick reminder–the quest logic and action sequences are not implemented directly in the code. Instead, we’ve implements our own engine, which reads a simplified text file with a set of actions. That way I can be sure that dozens and hundreds of logical interactions will not overload the game and it will remain stable even after hundreds of locations.
Nevertheless, we all understand that bugs will be bugs and there is no way you can release a game without testing. So the project has passed the most thorough tests. Of course, the most credit goes to our publisher, HeroCraft, or rather to their QA department. I am an avid quest fan myself with a lot of experience. So I perfectly understand how frustrating are bugs in this particular genre. When you have tried all the options and already reached out to solution and , finally understand that there is a bug in the game that makes it unsolvable, and it is now impossible finish it – what could be worse?! Maybe you are lucky to find an old saved game, but what if there is no saves? What if you saved in a desperate situation? The Horror! A dozen crashes would be better than that!
So, I assure you, we take the game testing extremely serious. When the project was submitted to the tests, QA specialists were given a strict order to search for logical errors with the utmost attention. I even compiled a special list of priorities:
1) Bugs of the highest category: by performing certain actions, including strange ones (by clicking everything, saving and loading, quickly pressing anywhere on the screen), you can “break” the game at any time in any location, which makes its walkthrough impossible;
2) Bugs of the first category: by doing any actions to find the opportunity to break the game at some critical moment and make the walkthrough impossible. Or using all the usual actions find an opportunity to freeze the game or crash it;
3) Bugs of the second category: everything else.
The guys tried their best to flicker, click and press everything in the game! And if something was found, we immediately corrected it. So I can say that the HeroCraft QA engineers did their best. Up until this point not once have we heard about any critical bugs that would not let you finish. Let’s hope that will be the case in the future.
That is all for today, folks. Next time let’s try to talk about mini-games.
Thank you all and have fun, everyone!

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