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      <h5><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">//<a href="../../../index.html"><font color="#7C420E">loonygames</font></a>://<a href="../index.html"><font color="#7C420E">issue 
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        2, <a href="index3.php"><font color="#7C420E">3</font></a> </font></b></h5>
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                      <p><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#0000FF"><i><font color="#904C10" size="2">Pad 
                        Happy: </font><font color="#904C10" size="4"><br>
                        <font size="3">Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About 
                        Game Testing</font></font></i></font></b><br>
                      
                      <div align="right"> <font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-1">By 
                        <a href="mailto:nickf@writeme.com">Nick Ferguson</a></font></div>
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                  <td width="45%" align="right" valign="top"> 
                    <h5 align="right"><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#00025E">Vol. 
                      2, Issue 7<br>
                      December 23, 1999&nbsp; </font></b></h5>
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              <h5 align="right">&nbsp; </h5>
              <div align="left"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="3"><loonystart></font></div>
              <h5 align="right">&nbsp; </h5>
              <h3 align="left"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><b>&#147;Testing 
                is a job for trained monkeys&#148;</b></font></h3>
              <p align="left"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br>
                If you want to be a programmer, you can&#146;t really blag your 
                way in without knowing how to program. Likewise, to be an artist 
                you&#146;ll need a decent portfolio and knowledge of a graphics 
                tool like 3D Studio. Level designers usually come with a few good 
                level designs under their belt, and most positions other than 
                that (namely producer and designer) are filled by people who&#146;ve 
                worked in the industry in some other capacity. Testing is quite 
                unique in that it doesn&#146;t require masses of experience or 
                any specific skill set to begin with &#150; hence the universally 
                low pay and status of the job &#150; but it does expose you to 
                a surprisingly broad array of issues in development. In the early 
                stages of a project you might be presented with early alpha builds 
                that demonstrate some of the core gameplay concepts, albeit without 
                many of the fancy bells and whistles. At this stage, you&#146;re 
                being asked to comment on the &#147;feel&#148; of the game &#150; 
                even at this early stage it&#146;s likely the development team 
                will have lost a fair amount of their objectivity (they&#146;ve 
                probably been working on it for about a year, mind) - and part 
                of being a good tester is having an encyclopaedic knowledge of 
                games &#150; cross-platform, cross-genre, cross-everything. Mindless 
                system advocates and die-hard genre fiends do not, in my opinion, 
                make good all-purpose testers: much better is a warm, open and 
                altruistic love of all things &#147;gamey&#148;, be it <b>Pokemon</b>, 
                <b>Quake</b> or <b>Baldur&#146;s Gate </b>(hey, that rhymes). 
                If you find yourself asking deeply philosophical questions like 
                &#147;What is a game, anyway?&#148; rather than &#147;Why do PlayStation 
                games suck?&#148; then you&#146;re on the path to becoming a grade-A 
                testing candidate...</font></p>
              <p align="left"></p>
              <p align="left"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">So, in 
                the early stages there really may be room for your suggestions 
                and feedback. However, the project will inevitably reach a point 
                where it gets feature-locked and most suggestions will be ignored 
                in favour of getting things that are already supposed to be in 
                there working properly. At this stage, you can bet that most of 
                your time will be spent bug-hunting &#150; either playing the 
                game to discover new bugs (&#147;hmmm, I wonder what happens if 
                I try running into this door whilst firing the bazooka&#148;) 
                or trying to recreate old ones that may or may not have been &#145;fixed&#146; 
                (&#147;hold Up when entering or leaving a room and any currently-held 

                items will be dropped&#148;). Ulp! At this time, it becomes handy 
                to have a good understanding of computer hardware and the processes 
                behind game development, as the more specific you can be about 
                a bug, the sooner the programmer will find and fix it. If you 
                don&#146;t know what a sprite or texture is, or what the Z-buffer 
                does, you might find it difficult to relate some of the weirdo 
                things you see onscreen to the guys writing the game. Of course, 
                that&#146;s why a lot of testing is done with the machine hooked 
                up through a VCR &#150; so you can trace the often-confusing sequence 
                of events leading to a lock-up.</font></p>
              <p align="left"></p>
              <p align="left"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">So, despite 
                the fact that no formal qualifications in testing exist, it seems 
                pretty obvious that a deep, wide knowledge and understanding of 
                games and the fundamentals of how they work can be a big plus. 
                Game development is an increasingly technical business, and I 
                would advise anyone thinking about working in it to get technical 
                ASAP &#150; start learning C/C++ in your spare time and find out 
                about 3D hardware! Likewise, developing an &#147;instinct&#148; 
                for bug hunting can soon become an art form &#150; one battle-scarred 
                tester I worked with had discovered several ways to lock up <b>Mario 
                64 </b>whilst playing it in his own time. I find that amazing: 
                I&#146;ve played the game for hundreds of hours and never seen 
                anything go awry...</font></p>
              <p align="left"></p>
              <p align="left"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"></loonystart></font></p>
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<p><i><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-2">Credits: Illustration 
  &copy; 1999 Dan Zalkus. Pad Happy is &copy; 1999 Niick Ferguson. All other content 
  is &copy; 1999 loonyboi productions. Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited, 
  so watch it - we know kung fu, gaijin.</font></i></p>
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