Do you enjoy playing video games?
As the game industry continues to develop, many related companies and jobs are also emerging. If you are interested in a career in game testing, Latis Global, experts in game localization, testing, voiceovers, and operation techniques, provides you with detailed information from our experts about the necessary skills to become a great game tester.
Essential Skills for Video Game Testers
I love playing video games, and I am pretty good at it. How do I become a game tester?
This has been a frequently asked question since Latis Global, the expert game testing provider, opened its doors a long time ago. Let’s take a look at a few aspects deemed important by our QA team, an expert group of game testers who has been praised for its quality work on numerous game testing projects done in collaboration with popular game developers inside and outside of Korea.
1) The Courage to Ask
It is only natural for a newcomer not to be fully aware of how the process works at the start of their career. A checkpoint marked during testing could be a bug or an intended in-game function. If you are unsure, do not hesitate to ask other staff or developers.
Likewise, if there is anything that is not included in the game developer’s guidelines, you should inquire about it. Do not be afraid of asking questions. If you make a judgment on your own without asking first, you may miss out on more serious issues later on.
2) Think Outside the Box!
Game testers may become attached to certain ideas after testing a lot of games. Problems arise when you start thinking like this: It functioned properly in the last build, so it should work fine now, and it no longer requires another check. If a new build is introduced, and a new mechanism is activated, there may be new glitches in a mechanism that has already been confirmed. You need to re-examine whether these new changes affect the previous elements of the game. Upon receiving a new build, it is advised to re-test how the latest changes and elements may have influenced the previous build.
3) Turn Record Keeping into a Habit
You should always make it a habit to keep records of your testing. This can come in the form of taking notes of what you consider to be a problem. In the case of video games, a particularly good way to do so is to record a video. The recorded video of a glitch or bug is very useful because it allows you to recreate the process that is causing the problem for other users.
For various reasons, you may not be able to reproduce some bugs perfectly, so it is important to check them multiple times in order to investigate the actual cause of the glitch and narrow down the possibilities. Video recording can be of big help in that process. It is better to collect video clips during testing as it might spare you from having to reach the same checkpoint 10 times. Moreover, screenshots can be useful when filling in bug reports.
4) Testing Various Devices and Their Peripherals
Sometimes, glitches could occur under very specific conditions, which is why you need to test your games on different devices, different screens, at different display resolutions, and under different settings. As technology advances and the gaming market grows, video games are being released as cross-platform products, which influences the variety in gaming platforms and their peripheral devices. It may not be possible to perfectly check every gaming environment, but environments with high user preference must be tested.
5) Be Patient
The tasks of video game testers are repetitive. They need to play the same game about 3-6 times a day, and over 40 times a month, while staying focused. For that reason, testers often quit their jobs after running out of patience. When there is a problem at a specific level, sometimes it is necessary to test all levels, and when a glitch occurs during that process, you may have to repeat the same step several times to reproduce the issue.
Even if you choose a career in testing due to your love for gaming, a tester’s tasks can sometimes be repetitive, so you need to be patient and keep calm at work.
Providing an Excellent Gaming Experience to Users
Video game testing consists in evaluating the quality of a game and reporting any issues so that developers can fix them. Video game testers exist to provide the best possible video game experience and assist the developers in releasing the game they want.
In addition, testers may have to continue performing tests on the game even after release. Almost every game these days requires constant testing, as developers regularly update and release expansions with new content.
