industry practice - quality assurance (alpha testing)

Quality Assurance (Alpha Testing)

What is Quality Assurance?

Quality assurance, also known as alpha testing is a process used to make sure that any published content is of high quality and standard. In the gaming world and in context to our visual novel, this can involve testing things such as making sure the game runs smoothly, assets such as characters and backgrounds are displayed, spelling mistakes aren't present and that there are no bugs that make the game unplayable or cause issues. Usually during this phase of development, games wont be fully complete. They may be missing some assets such as certain backgrounds, sound effects or sprites, or even missing areas of the game as this isn't a fully finished and developed build. During this phase a game is not completed, but gathering feedback as it is developed is still vitally important.

In the industry, usually bigger scale companies will hire and pay 'game testers' to play through and experiment with the game. Game testing is a very important job, and helps for these issues to be picked up. The larger scale of play testers the better the game and feedback a company will receive, as they have input from multiple different sources who may all notice different things. In terms of smaller indie games companies and developers, this is usually conducted on a much smaller scale due to budging. In our case for example, we will be gathering beta testers from people we know and our peers from class to test our game for free and in return we will also be testing there's so we both can a fair exchange.

There are many sites online for both developers and game testers to advertise and help each other out. These allow developers to get in contact with people who will test their game, and allows testers to play new games either for free or in exchange of payment so both parties get something and help each other out. An Example of one of this sites is gametester.gg , which allows both parties to advertise and find work via this website.

Game Tester official site.

Why it is Important

In the gaming industry, alpha testing is extremely important. It is important to alert developers of issues or bugs, and also to provide feedback or ideas on things that could be changed or altered as the game is being developed. During the alpha phase of development, things won't be as polished and finalised and changes will constantly be made. After alpha testing is completed a game will move onto beta testing, which is a more finalised version before its official public release.

In the alpha testing phase, feedback can be provided to help fix things that may not of been intended or noticed, such as spelling errors or notes of changing specific backgrounds for a few examples.

How we used it - Alpha testing our Game

For our game, we released an alpha version on our itch.io page. This version of the game was not fully complete, and was missing backgrounds and transition scenes in a few areas. As well as this, we hadn't properly checked through all of our grammar and spellings yet, so there was bound to be a few mistakes and issues that came up.

We managed to get 2 people who were willing the alpha test for us! A lot of the issues that were brought up consisted of certain sprites missing, or characters appearing when others were talking, or the few missing assets. Thankfully, these could all be easily fixed and was just due to a few mismatched coding mistakes and waiting on completion for some of our sprites. 

Another issue that was brought to out attention was spelling and grammar issues. I am really thankful these were brought up, as there's quite a few we missed or didn't catch when we were going through. Our alpha tester screenshotted and wrote down notes about every spelling or grammar issue they noticed for us, and told us how it should be changed as well. This saved us a lot of time and we were incredibly thankful for it as it is exactly what we needed.

Overall the alpha testing feedback we got was pretty good, it was mainly small issues that could be fixed quite simply by us running over our coding again or fixing some missing assets etc. The feedback was direct messaged to me, which I forwarded to our director, Katie, who went through and changing the issues within the code or spelling mistakes. We plan to finish completing our assets and finalising our game all together in a call within the next week, so that we can release a Beta of our game and ask for a bit more in depth feedback before we publicly release our completed game.

References:

Anon, Game Tester [online]. Gametester.gg. Available at: https://gametester.gg/developer [Accessed 16 May 2025].