Production woes a not so good ay today.

Mammoth

Hi there everybody, I had two apps ready to go and reviewed in the app store. While in waited for my tax information to arrive, i play test the game using the GS veiwer. Everything worked out fine, however when I actually put my game on my iPad, there were some technical issues. I en had to pull my apps from the process and redo them.

The irony is that my tax forms came in and now I can release apps. So my two apps are still in review. It's not exacty the way I planned to make this happen. But I guess it is just the way it is supposed to go.

What do you guysnto to QA your apps. I usually do it at the end. Do some people do this at the beginning, in the middle?
I have a couple of other games in the works I would love to hear everybody's opinion on how to make more quality games and not have something like this happen again?

Also why is there a performance difference between the GS viewer and published app. All of my apps work great In the viewer but not in published form.

Thanks again

quantumsheep

QA is something that should happen *as* you're building the game. If you put a new feature in, play the build lots till you're satisfied it works properly. Don't just play it as you're supposed to. Do things you're NOT supposed to, as you can never tell what your players might do!

THEN, if everything's ok, move onto the next thing.

Sending adhoc builds out to people is useful too, because they may come up with an idea you never thought of, or might play the game in a completely different way to you, which could highlight bugs.

Even after all this, a few bugs will undoubtedly slip through the net, so be prepared to make updates to fix these!

Hope that helps!

QS

mangaroo

Defiantly agree with QS (congrats on adding GC btw), as you go along you test and test and test.

I add a feature or two and test it out under all circumstances i can think off..think new beatemup for the first time...button mashing.

in your specific case it seems it was just about creating adhoc builds to test out instead of just relying on the viewer

Having created the rules yourself you tend to play it they way it is supposed to so I tend to give it to people to play for the first time as well and see what they do to mess up if its possible..especially important if you aren't comfortable getting bug testers yet.

Mammoth

How do the big companies handle this?

Im working on a shooter right now so what I should try and do is make sure everything works really well and QA the game as I am making it.

Dizko

Big companies have entire QA departments, all they do is test. We have them at my day job and no matter how much we test our own stuff they manage to find a bunch of stuff we didn't. Sometimes you need a fresh set of eyes on it, my suggestion would be to get your game into someone else's hands for a bit and see if they find anything.

jonmulcahy

i used testflightapp.com to help me with beta testing my latest game. I'm glad I did. I'm still a few weeks away from submision, but the people testing found a ton of issues I would have missed!

Mammoth

Wow that is great I was wondering if there was a company that did that. QA is for sure a big part of this industry. I think I might do this one a bigger game of mine

Mammoth

Jon is that site free? If it is that will just make my day

RedlerTech

yes it is

Mammoth

OMG!!! Wait, you get unlimited QA for free.

kapser

Yes, there is studios that only does QA. Also, some send some projects to some of their other studios.

Sometimes, there's teams of over 30 people working full time on one game searching bugs and doing walkthroughs.

TestFlight sounds interresting, thanks for the link.