Zoo Vet Endangered Animals and Quality Assurance

As you all know, we are nearing the release date for the downloadable version of Zoo Vet Endangered Animals. There were some snags along the way, but I am very relieved that they were ironed out by the very capable developers. I had originally planned to have this game complete much earlier than it was. You may ask, “How can this happen, Natascha? How can games be late when development is planned out with schedules, budgets and much documentation?”

I remember a time before I got involved in game development when I had the same question. I was (and still am) one of those people that sees a release date for a game that I really want and become disappointed when it doesn’t come out on time. But after spending full price money on many games, and then finding out that they come full of errors is even more upsetting to me. For example, I was playing The Age of Conan MMO this week and was running through a single player quest. I was working hard for about 30-45 minutes in this dungeon when my camera went all wonky for a couple of seconds and then I was stuck inside of the geometry! I tried the commands to unstick my avatar from inside of the column, but it didn’t work. So I had to log off and lost all of that hard work. It ruined my gameplay experience completely and I could not play again that night!

The Quality Assurance Phase of Development is VERY Important!

I believe that one of the most common reasons for games being held back from release is a snag in the Quality Assurance phase of development. This is because many developers would rather ship a quality product late than a sub-par product on time. The Quality Assurance phase consists of the following steps.

1.    The game is played over and over again by game testers. It’s these testers’ job to find bugs and report them in a database.

2.    The developers fix issues reported in the database, then make a new version of the game (called a build), then send it back to QA.

3.    This process is repeated until the producer/executive producer feels that the game is bug free enough to sell.

While this process sounds straightforward and efficient, there can be complications. During the Quality Assurance phase of development, complications most commonly arise in two forms.

•    The testers find an issue that is bad enough to keep the game from launching (called a showstopper); however, they cannot figure out how to get it to happen again. This makes it very hard for developers to pinpoint what is causing the problem and so cannot fix it.

•    The testers find a serious issue that the developers have a hard time fixing where the issue is important enough to keep the game from launching.

When these things happen, there is not much that you can do other than “work harder”. These problems can happen in any project because just like with life, you never can plan for or predict what will happen with the QA process. A developer cannot possibly know what kind of bugs will show up in the game.

Zoo Vet Endangered Animals had a bit of this in the Quality Assurance process. We could not predict that there would be some hard to fix issues and had to try our best to figure a way to fix everything before launching. We hope you enjoy our stable, well tested game!

Cheers,

Natascha Thomas