Post Menu and Details.
- Combinatorial Testing
- Compatibility Evaluation
- Performance Evaluation
- Testing for Functionality
- Gamer Interaction Testing
- Regression Testing
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According to a recent study from GlobalData, the worldwide gaming market is projected to hit roughly $300B in 2025, thanks to the rise of innovative services, including cloud gaming and social gaming. Considering the gaming industry’s continuous growth and development across the globe, industry pioneers are now pushing for the existence of a virtual future potentially quicker than many would expect.
However, gaming industries need to rely not just on the trends of the future but also on identifying the desires of their users. Providing a finished game with defects and glitches would elicit negative feedback from customers, resulting in a significant drop in unit revenue.
Even the most successful game developers would be unable to survive without understanding their key demographics and if their games are ready for mass distribution. Game testing is an important phase in ensuring optimum efficiency and consistency in the final product. Many companies will provide you with a dedicated QA team that ensures the complete circle of game testing.
These services have a critical eye to the implementation phase, focusing on persistent checks such as mistakes, comprehensiveness, glitches, bottlenecks, contradictions, coherence, and so forth. Before games are released to the consumers, they must be tested thoroughly – not doing so would be a foolish act on the part of the developers and the company that owns them.
Regardless of the methodology used, the main goal of game testing is to find and record any bugs in the program. Bugs are the generic name for these defects. The purpose of game testing is to find glitches and keep track of the documentation of the products.
Combinatorial Testing
This approach allows you to evaluate the game in the early phases quickly. The first move is to figure out the amount of testing the game would need. As a result, you will use this review form to decide if the game meets specific criteria or works without bugs. It also evaluates and investigates all of its outputs and inputs so that you can get a better picture of various possible variations and results.
It is often used to produce test cases for software testing. Combinational research strategies increase the efficacy of test implementation, accuracy, phase containment, and expense in testing video games.
Compatibility Evaluation
Software Compatibility Testing
Because computer games are also basically the same as other software apps, they have to be designed to function on multiple platforms. The more digital environments they can work and reside in, the more marketable they will be. Thus, games need to be compatible with a variety of OS platforms.
Suppose a game is designed for mobile phones and tablets. In that case, the programmers must do their best to make the game itself compatible with famous platforms such as Android, iOS, and KaiOS, as they are the most popular operating systems for mobile devices. If it is designed for desktops or laptops, compatibility for Windows and macOS would be a priority. To further expand the audience reach of the game, compatibility with other OSs such as various Linux distributions would have to be considered.
Hardware Compatibility Testing
In addition to the software compatibility aspect, hardware compatibility is another major factor. Just because a computer game functions appropriately in various software environments already, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it would behave well in any hardware.
This means that the game testing company that’s commissioned to handle the QA task must also test the game in various hardware equipment so that the fullest efficiency of it can be truly assessed. During this procedure, hardware components of personal computers like the graphics card, the RAM module, and the CPU will be highly involved as they are the main factors that affect the game’s speed, loading time, and overall performance.
Compatibility checking identifies any flaws in usability and determines whether the finished product satisfies the hardware, software, and graphical specifications. These kinds of testing are necessary to maintain the game’s consumers’ satisfaction. This kind of evaluation allows you to see how the game’s user interface is designed for various screen sizes and devices.
This is routinely done for both computer and PC titles. For example, in mobile gaming, this will be used to see how the game works well on various Android devices. This method may be used to determine if the game is compatible with multiple platforms.
Performance Evaluation
Performance evaluation is used to assess an app’s cumulative performance in real-world environments. This method of monitoring ensures that the current infrastructure is capable of supporting the game’s seamless operation. Load checking, to be specific, is used to see whether a program or device can handle a certain amount of stress.
The primary goal of performance optimization is to improve game speed. At performance testing, the following vital parameters are examined: graphic quality, processing and memory limitations, network access, battery usage, and responsiveness.
Testing for Functionality
This method of inspection is conducted to ensure that the finished game meets the standards. Functionality quality assessment reviewers look for concerns like game asset credibility, reliability issues, audio-visual hitches, gameplay issues in the game, and its visuals and UI. Performance problems such as freezing, collapsing, and progression blockages are only a few of the items that professional game reviewers address while evaluating immersive apps.
User interface checks, on the other hand, ensure that the game is user-friendly. UI testing aims to illustrate two important aspects: material types and visual elements. In addition, the localization checks of the game should be completed.
Gamer Interaction Testing
Another major step to be taken in the game testing process is figuring out if the primary purpose of the game’s design is indeed attained. Although the entirety of the game manufacturing process is a highly technical and complex one, game developers must never forget that games are designed for the ultimate satisfaction of the gamers.
As such, gamer interaction testing should be conducted to see if the reactions and behaviors of the ones who will play the game will be according to the expectations of the developers. In some cases, though, the initial objectives could be overridden as better functionalities or a much more innovative set of functionalities are devised. This is necessary to make the designed game even better.
Regression Testing
Even though some parts of the game will eventually be changed based on how the potential users might react to the initial testing phase, the core framework may remain. If so, they have to be re-tested if they are still functioning according to the initial functions that they’ve been crafted with.
During this process, the newer additions of plug-ins should be detached from the system to honestly assess what components are causing some bugs, if any. As the process goes on, the other components will be added little by a bit while scraping each possible bug that might arise. Whatever problems might arise will be ironed out as the developers will develop a newer or better version of the game.
Thank you for reading!