WebCamp Zagreb
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2020–2022
44:25 · 941 views · Nov 6, 2018
Alen Ladavac of Croteam talks about continuous integration and automated testing pipelines in games, with case studies from The Talos Principle and Serious Sam.
HN points to it as a rare, practical look at how a game studio tests its games and engine.
4 comments from Hacker News
Here's also a good overview how Croteam (creators of Serious Sam and The Talos Principle) approach automated testing: this video The talk is from 2018 and references some of the trends in the industry towards more automated testing.
I worked at an MMO game company and the only testing we had was manual QA for functional testing and bot clients for server stress testing. Not a great environment for building quality software. (Our max server uptime was about 24 hours.) The client had a secret level with all game objects for testing and debugging. But reading your post makes me see that we didn’t think ahead far enough: the secret level could have been the foundation for automated unit testing game objects and battling characters. I haven’t watched them yet, but I added these relevant videos to my YouTube backlog just this week: * Automated Testing of Gameplay Features in 'Sea of Thieves' (GDC 2019): [LINK] * Taking CI and automated testing seriously (2018): this video
> From what I've seen game industry has terrible software engineering practices. You'd be surprised. Here's a talk from Croteam on how they test their games and engine: this video I'd wager all major engines are exhaustively tested. Trouble is, there's combinatorial explosion of game state, user input, assets, scripted behaviour and engine, so there's a huge area to cover.
Not TDD but here is a talk about automated testing at Croteam Continuous integration and testing pipelines in games - case studies of The Talos Principle and Serious Sam this video