Caltrops - Gamerasutra





	[quote name="Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS)"][quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey "]My question is: has anyone ever heard of an external beta testing shop? Like, submit a game, give them a walk through or whatever and they test it for some fee?[/quote] <font color=yellow> <sarcasm mode="on"></font> Yeah, the ESRB. (Or the new rating board from Europe, PEGI.) They go through and make sure what objectionable content is claimed by the game manufacturer is what is there and that there is not other objectionable material that is not declared. Take Two got into a shitload of trouble when someone found out how to unlock the Hot Coffee mod in <i>Gears of Halo Theft Auto 3</i> err I mean <i>Grand Theft Auto III San Andreas</i>. I suspect most of these companies don't really do a lot of testing more than is necessary, e.g. "hey, the loading screen actually comes up, I guess it's time to ship it."<font color=yellow> </sarcasm></font> Since there's no real penalty for releasing a game that crashes or sucks, I suspect a lot of these companies don't do enough testing because they don't have to cover tech support (when was the last time anyone needed tech support to get a game to install?) If the game installs okay, that's all they're liable to cover. If the game doesn't work for you that's not their problem to solve. If you buy Word Perfect and you can't get it to set footers correctly or build the table of cross-references, you can call Corel for tech support to figure out why it won't do what you're asking. If you buy <i>Gears of Halo Theft Auto 5</i> and you can't figure out how to shut off power to the orphans home during the winter (hey, who are they going to complain to, their parents?), you're on your own or until you can find a walkthrough. The manufacturer doesn't have to provide support to tell you that you can't kill the orphans by letting them freeze to death if you're playing the <b>Crazy Crack Dealer</b>, you have to be playing as the <b>Corrupt Politician</b>. [quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey "]The next big project I want to do involves gameplay from 1986 Wasteland. It'd be a few years off, but I'd like to do a Kickstarter to pay for John St. John to do some voice overs during the combat, and get an external lab or whatever to test it, after it's already been through the testing ringer of my friends and social network. I guess the larger question is: how do these indie places beta test all their games?[/quote] The same way the company I worked for beta tested the application we were distributing to allow federal railroad safety inspectors to write up railroad safety violations. Me and the other guy who were writing it went through and tried everything we could think of to see if it would fail. Most companies do not have systematic testing protocols, automated testing tools, testing scripting and other things to try and find bugs in a manner that doesn't depend upon the person who wrote the code being expected to find the bugs they created. In most software shops, testing tends to be <i>ad hoc</i> and on a best efforts basis. No honest programmer wants to release a program with bugs, and sometimes it can't be helped. But all the companies care about is shoveling shit out the door, the business practices of game makers remind me of Chinese food distributors who thought using melamine - a type of plastic - was a great way to make food look like it had more protein. [/quote]