Hi! I’m Dan and I’m a designer and QA tester at Another Dollar Studios!

While working on Another Day the majority of my time has been spent playtesting the game and working on quality assurance. It’s been a constant task to make sure that the game is as good as it can be. Good user experience is highly important with all games, however due to the nature of Another Day and the informative, emotional experience that we are trying to provide to players, I feel that it is even more important that the game runs smoothly so that it can tell the story without being hindered by bugs. 

The majority of what I’ve been doing is playing through the game at various points, testing the limits of the game’s functions and keeping my eyes out for bugs and issues that could impact the functionality of our game. While some of these can be funny little mishaps, such as the hurdles in the dinosaur jumping minigame flying towards the player at breakneck speeds, some of them can really hinder the games playability, such as an issue that I came across where a box was pressed, causing the player to fall out of the game world! 

Dealing with these issues, however, is a completely different affair. While some of them are easy enough for me to resolve myself, most of the time I’ll have to contact one of the programmers and ask them to search through the code of the game to solve the issue. 

The image above shows an example of the team’s QA document, which I use to categorise and describe all of the issues I've come across while QA testing the game. It gives a title, severity level, type of issue (so people know who’s best to resolve the issue when something breaks), a short description, and steps for how to recreate the bug. It also contains a link to the QA channel in the team’s Discord server, where more details of the bug in addition to screenshots of it. 

Professionalism and good communication are highly important skills for QA testing, as I often have to discuss issues and potential ways to resolve them with my teammates. 

The images above show screenshots of two quite problematic bugs. The first image shows what happens when a 2D screen is incorrectly loaded onto a 3D environment - 3D scenery is displayed in the dinosaur jumping minigame, obscuring the screen and making it impossible to play the minigame. 

The second image shows a severe issue, as there was a small portion of time where the build of the game would randomly throw the player up through the ceiling and out of the game world (behind the pause screen is the roof of the building that the player has flown out of!). This occurred because a rigidbody modifier was activated at the wrong point in time; thankfully this has since been solved so you won’t find yourself flying off into the void when playing Another Day! 

Fortunately some issues just require the right box in Unity’s editor to be ticked, however some can be a real challenge to resolve. Thankfully I work alongside some astounding programmers and fellow designers, who are able to get the bugs that I find under control.  Making sure that the game has as few bugs and issues as possible has been crucial to development, and we hope that the released game runs as smoothly as possible. 

Daniel Hebert