Nifta

Well, thanks for all the replies, particularly nifta .

Basically I'm going for this job because it seems more relvent to me than working in sainsbury's...

bah, with all these idiots making design suggestions, I hope I'm not going to get weeded out because they think I'm one of them, all i want to do is find bugs all day, it should be about as monotomous as stacking shelves and whatnot, except I get to sit down, plus I assume it also involves some thinking, such as what might cause it, how to bring the bug about again, and so on and so forth?

Yep it's all about the reproduction, baby

So true.. so true....

If I see one more bug report that has the following line....

Reproduction rate = random

There's no such thing! GAHHHHH!!!!!

The best bug I've ever seen was from one of the internal testers at Software Creations when I worked there:

"The whole fucking fucker's fucked!"

And to be fair, it was perfectly accurate.

(can't remember the game - Barbie or something...)

Who was that? I used to work at Ocean QA years back, and I know quite a few of the guys who fled over to Creations QA when Infogrames brought the axe down on the Castle Street QA. I hear that Acclaim have moved into that building now... evil swines that they are.

Well, thanks for all the replies, particularly nifta .

Basically I'm going for this job because it seems more relvent to me than working in sainsbury's...

bah, with all these idiots making design suggestions, I hope I'm not going to get weeded out because they think I'm one of them, all i want to do is find bugs all day, it should be about as monotomous as stacking shelves and whatnot, except I get to sit down, plus I assume it also involves some thinking, such as what might cause it, how to bring the bug about again, and so on and so forth?

Good luck Sausage. You seem to have at least half a brain, which will put you far above some of the people I've seen hired as QA temps. Come across as intelligent, articulate and willing to work hard and the job's probably as good as yours. The fact that you're even thinking about what to put on your CV stands you in good stead. But don't hang around; get that application in quickly or you'll probably lose the position to some schmuck who doesn't know his ass from his elbow and I'll be getting godawful bug reports about features that are debug QA-assist functions

I started off in QA at Rare (a very well-run outfit at the time) and most recently went through EA's (excellent) QA process. In between I've had much less satisfactory experiences with QA. IMHO the key to a good testing department is the database as much as the people.

Rather relying on testers to provide verbose descriptions of the bug, it helps if the company has a proper database set up for this sort of thing, tailored to each game. For example, when logging a bug you should have to categorise the type (crash, graphical glitch, etc), location in game (Forest_Clearing_1) and anything else that makes it piss easy for the developers to find and fix.

Unfortunately most people look on test as this unfortunate process that must be endured at the end of a project, which is completely the wrong attitude imho.

Oh, and testers who think they know best, and never shut up about it: fuck off.

Yup, the American EA QA departments are a really sharp bunch. Once you've been through CQC you know your game is solid as a rock! And all their testers have the funniest names in the world (Dwayne Schultz Jr III and such like), which helps you through the long hours

EA Europe are okay, but not really much better than most other publishing QA.

Some of the best "Playability" type bugs are the ones you'd get back from the Publisher's testers. Something like:

"Control feels too lose"

And thats it. Not even a suggestion on how to change it - just lazy, blatent critcism. This is stupid, and counter-productive. Don't ever pass on a bug like this, it's only got to piss off the over worked programmers.

"I was playing the game and it crashed." oh. I see. Well, we'll fix that one 'eh?

HOW did it crash? WHAT were you doing? Can you reproduce it? How have you narrowed it down to determine what caused it to crash? Gah!

Hey, Penguin, remember that EIDOS one; "The ball continued to bounce forever, until it stopped".

Sega Europe QA were lots of fun too 'eh?

Just dont do what I did.

Went for a gametester interview at Codemasters, during which I was sat down to playtest a version of TOCA on the PS1 for 5 minutes and asked to report back with any bugs/problems found. Pressure was on and by the end of it, all I could come up with was a bit of dodgy collision detection and pop-up, both of which were apparently "just part of the game"... at which point I got me coat ..

In that situation, don't head for the main game. Just scour the front end, there are always the most bugs in front-end menus (unless it's a very simple one for an arcadey game). Just look at the memory card screens and pull controllers out of sockets here and there, checking for warning messages. That kind of stuff is always dodgy until a game's nearly finished. Nice easy finds.

It is evil expecing people to find bugs within 5 minutes. Normally takes a day or so for a tester to become familiar enough with a game to determine what's normal behaviour and what's a bug.

Depends from testing job to testing job. Some testing jobs are as you say, others are in smaller teams and play as much a role in commenting on design and difficulty etc as in "normal" testing. My job had plenty of design comment in it - for us it was part of the job to point out things such as unbalanced difficulty and so on.

It does vary a lot. In some smaller dev companies you're the only tester on the game (until the external publisher QA kicks in); you work within the dev team from Prototype through to final submission, so you'll have a valid understanding about why things work the way they do and will be able to make valid gameplay comments. In fact you'll often be relied upon to do so.

I can see what Jon Pickford's saying though. It's damn annoying when sometimes testers think that they understand how to make the game play better than the programmer who's actually written the game in the first place. Coders aren't soulless machines who have no concept of playability (well.. not all of them ), but sometimes testers seem to think that they know best.

At codies, don't be under any illusions that as a temp you'll be working with the dev team and tweaking the game to perfection. Each dev studio has a Design Team that do that in conjunction with the programmers. QA is a huge department, in a separate building well away from the dev teams. Rows and rows of people testing away. Test the game and report where the crashes and bugs are, that's the job

Personally I'm leaning towards J Pickford's viewpoint right now though! We're due to be going into Sony for a submission any day and I'm getting a little tired of the Class D Suggestions that are still being entered into the QA report. Gah! I want some sleep again!

I work at Codies. I'm in dev, not QA, but spend a lot of time with the QA guys. Just say that you're willing to work hard. Offer that you're willing to work overtime. Lots of overtime. They'll love you!

Knowledge of games is important, but don't get carried away saying how much you love playing games. It might give the impression you think the job involves sitting around playing different games all day! It's not!

"I'd like to get across the fact that I have a good knowledge of games, and am not a twat who basically thinks that a games testers job is basically about having fun all day playing games...I know fully well it is hard work, and I intend to stay commited to the job if I get it. But I can't just put that in my CV, now can I?"

Absolutely do say that! It's common to stick a 'Personal Profile" at the start of a CV now, and that's a single paragraph (or two) about who you are and why you'd be good for the position.

As a tester you'll be testing the same game every day for weeks, probably months. And you're not playing, you're testing. You won't be looked at to offer loads of insight into gameplay balancing, there are full-time games designers employed for that. You'll be working to a strict testing plan; you might have to continuously test a single screen of a football management game for a few days. Or sit there pulling a memory card in and out of a PS2 on different screens of am front-end for hours on end!

I'm not trying to put you off it, I'm just trying to give you an insight into what testings about.

Other tips; you'll need a very good command of written english. You'll be expected to write logical, well-structured details of how to reproduce a bug for the development team to look at. No spelling mistakes!

Show good verbal communication skills too, so that you can explain details about a bug.

CV Stuff? ;

A ) Hard working; Show other jobs you've had

B ) Exam results; English and Maths are probably the most important

C ) PC literate;

1) You'll need to be able to use bug-tracking databases

2) Being able to encode AVIs of bugs you've caught on video is part of the job (but you'd get training).

3) Good keyboard-skills. You'll be typing up your bug reports.

D) Games knowledge.

E) Foreign languages - you'll be testing the foreign-language versions too, so any basic knowledge of other languages is a help.

It's a big ol' QA department, but there's a good atmosphere there!

Hope that's helpful. Good luck!

Nifta

System 3 is back! Cool...  a new Last Ninja game would be excellent - I loved them on the C64, and I think there was one or two on the Amiga. Plenty of room for a modern update.

Thats what they have planned.

I was lucky enough to go down the pub with John Twiddy when I did some testing work on Street Wars (sequel to Constructor) about five years back. System3 (or Studio3 as they're calling themselves) were working on a Last Ninja sequel back then. I think that was already the second effort at a 32-bit version. Wouldn't really hold yer breath about seeing a 128-bit version now.

Actually, go back and play the Last Ninja games again now. When I did, I found it was definitely a case of rose-tinted spectacles; a real case of style over substance. Looked beatiful, but really didn't play that well. So slooooow.

But the music.... oh the music... so good! And the best box-art of all time

True Crime crashes on certain Xboxes too, I believe. I don't think its the type of game, just laziness of the port.

I could be wrong though!

Microsoft aren't reknowned for the strictness of their final QA. They're certainly a lot more 'relaxed' than Sony. They'll even pass Xbox games with known crashes in them from what I've heard.

I guess this is 'cos they use an external QA department (rather than Sony's internal one at Liverpool), so this means that for every game that they fail (for crashes, bugs etc) they'll have to pay their external company loads more wonga to check the game over again when it comes to resubmitting a version with the bugs fixed.

MFAudio is a good little PC utility that lets you rip the common PS2 audio-formats from CD/DVD and convert them to wavs. Not sure it'd work with Frequency though as I guess all of the bass/drums/synths etc will be as separate audio streams though...

Well now all they need to do is add RGB scart leads as standard as well.

Somehow they always come in as well when I buy a new console. I thought they were standard.

I've never had a console that comes with an RGB-Scart. They only ever come with those crappy Scarts with the composite cables and scart-block-adapter to put on the end.

Come on, how many TVs are released these days that don't have RGB-enabled Scart Sockets? Give us a proper RGB scart cable

Sony/MSoft & Nintendo just know I'm an AV-whore though and will go out and buy one though

I've a mate who's a project manager at Blitz called Phil (glasses, and a bit thin on top ). Said that he did a talk at a Uni the other day, could've been him!

I'm at codies, and there's still a bit of friction between the Olivers (Blitz) and the Darlings (Codies) from what I hear...

Haven't a clue what's going on behind the scenes (codies is a big company) but I've got my fingers crossed something could come of it though. Think it would be nice to see him back