It’s testing time! We’ve sent out a demo of this game to some very fortunate testers, who have been tasked with not only playing the game… but breaking it. And break they did. Our testers managed to find bugs and collision issues we never could’ve imagined:

Collision Problems

The most common variant of bug in this game is definitely collision issues. Our engine requires us to “paint” all of the collision tiles on the map, which is prone to error on some of the larger maps. Without all of the necessary collision tiles, it is easy for a persistent player to find holes and go out of bounds. Or onto tables.

Typos and Character Encoding 

The next most frequent issue is typos. Despite having watched this opening scene hundreds of times, none of caught that awkwardly phrased sentence. Meanwhile, this tester probably noticed it within a minute! This is why it’s so important to have a fresh pair of eyes.

Others pointed out character encoding issues, which are the nemesis of any who works with web programming.

Game Breakers

Game breaking bugs are relatively infrequent, but obviously the most serious. In the above figure, Curtis had just finished suplexing the dragon (cliche, I know) and moving the dragon into his hurt state. But… now what? The menu for the next turn is supposed to appear! However, it never has and the tester is setting there waiting for his next turn to this day. These sorts of bugs are generally the result of fast and loose programming, which is one of the perils of a language such as Javascript. Perhaps an unexpected value was returned somewhere and the program did not know how to handle it. The conditions to start the next turn were never met.

Oversights

The last set of issues we noticed were what I would classify as oversights by us a team. For example, a lot of testers noted that we do not have a quit button in the menu, and they are absolutely correct! We’ve been testing on the browser for so long that we totally forgot to add this basic and essential feature for desktop players. Whoops! Another oft-requested feature is the ability to skip cutscenes, since there are so many. In this case, that was a debug feature that we explicitly removed… but may have to work in if these suggestions of any indication.

Conclusion

Testing is not fun for the developer or for the tester, but it’s a necessary evil. It’s amazing how things we as a team have seen for ages now totally went unnoticed and testers managed to spot it within minutes. This shows the importance of a fresh pair of eyes and an open mind in developing the best game you can make as a team. We are grateful for our testers and are currently clearing a mountain of bugfixes. The work of a game developer never ends.