Comments on: Automated game testing

By: Jens

Jens — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 20:33:09 +0000

Hey Elizabeth,

I’ve restored the link with the Hyena file specifications: http://www.collectingsmiles.com/wiki/index.php?title=Hyena_AudioGame_specifications

Let me know if you need any help!

By: Elizabeth

Elizabeth — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 14:32:01 +0000

I hope as a late comer to this site that it’s still viable to ask – I downloaded the gamebook engine with the intent of writing my own simple stories for fun – thank you for making it! – but I cannot find the hyena scripting language information. Would you be willing to email this to me as the page is gone from your site? Also, I’d love to have access to the tool for checking out how my gamebook might play out!

Thank you for considering my request.

Warm regards,
Elizabeth

By: Jens

Jens — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 02:22:21 +0000

Hey Daniel,

Cool, it’s quite an interesting topic I think, but it might be hard to find too much information. I don’t really have any more information for you either, as I haven’t really pursued it much further. I did more experimentation with more complicated systems, but I was more after interesting ways to visualize the flow of a game which could help the design processes. It worked really well for the choose-your-own-adventure type of branching story used in Hyena, but with more complicated setups it started to fall apart.

The idea was that through sampling a massive amount of playthroughs generate a graph showing how player choices led to consequences later on. The game that I worked on was very complicated in this aspect (time passing was a key factor in what happened in the game) and I failed to visualize this complicated system in a good way. It worked well for bug-finding though where it helped find some crash bugs and also some progression blockers.

From my experience in the games industry, people are spending most of their efforts in metrics/telemetry, where they attach tools to the QA team and focus testing groups to get more accurate information. The extent of automatic game testing in most projects is usually limited to smoke testing where you automatically load up each level in the game and do some basic test. Also, input stress testing is fairly common, where you generate random button presses over a long period of time.

Not sure if this was any help, but let me know if there is anything else I can do to help. And I’d love to read your paper once it’s done.

By: Daniel Türpitz

Daniel Türpitz — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 20:31:46 +0000

Hello Mr. Andersson,

I am very interested in automatic software testing with computer games. I read your article and I asked me if you have more information about that topic. I would like to write a paper for my study and I am searching for interesting stuff to do that.

Thank you
Daniel