The latest big titles in the world of gaming take years to develop. The game development process is long, arduous and perhaps most importantly it is collaborative. Game testers are generally an under valued part of that process. Typically they join a project when it is close to completion and they help the development team to find bugs and glitches so they can be fixed before release.
Many people think of game testing as simply playing games all day but there is a lot more to it than that. The pay tends to be low and the hours can be long but when it is going well working as a game tester can be one of the most enjoyable jobs on the planet.
My career in games development started out with a casual testing job and it was a great crash course in how the whole process works. For me it proved to be a foot in the door which enabled me to move on to design and then production. Many people take jobs as game testers with the intention of moving into design, art or software engineering. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t. Testing can also be a rewarding job in itself and it has a career ladder of its own so many talented people remain in test departments.
Have you ever been playing a game and you’ve reached a point where the next mission fails to trigger or the game just repeatedly crashes? Perhaps you’ve found a spot on the map where your character gets stuck in the environment collision or worst of all you’ve done a mission in an order the designer never expected and broken the scripting. These are all bugs and professional game testers work around the clock to identify them and highlight them so that they can be fixed before the game is released.
Game testers will also identify visual glitches, audio bugs and make suggestions about potential changes to benefit the gameplay. If brought on early enough to have a say in design, game testers can be a valuable asset because they generally play more games than anyone else at a developer. This gives them an insight into what is intuitive for gamers, how to break missions and what feels right in terms of controls and pacing.
It is a sad fact that testers are often ignored and under used as a resource. At the end of the day game testers are important because they ensure the games you purchase work as intended and are relatively free of bugs. The work they do drastically improves the end user experience for you the gamer.