A job as a video game tester is certainly not an easy one. Treating it like it’s a side gig won’t lead you anywhere. You need to fulfill every single aspect the gaming company you’re working for wants to make sure you’re hired again. Once landing your game testing job, you’ll want to start getting everything right. You’ll need to be able to write detailed reports to make it much easier for the developers. This will make you look like a true professional and that will get you to land more game testing jobs and be offered more money. Let’s take a look at some important aspects after landing your game testing job.
First of all, you really must read everything sent to you about the game. It’ll tell you how the game is going to be and let you test the game knowing what the target audience is. The game developers will surely appreciate you giving them feedback as how the game is when compared to the information that you were given about it. Along with the game to test and the instructions, you’ll be given a deadline to finish up your report as well as a standard format to submit your evaluation.
Then you must remember that you are not playing for fun. It’s a game testing job, and so you’ll need to do more than just playing the game as you would normally do. You’ll need to test every single feature of the game, every single character, and try to do things that you believe the game isn’t ready to respond. Look for things that are out of place, bugs you find along the way, levels that just aren’t right, impossible jumps that are possible and areas that you didn’t think were possible to reach but resulted in a bug or glitch of some sort.
When you’re testing you need to learn that you absolutely must take note at every single thing you do in the game. Your job is to let developers know what works and what doesn’t work for you. Be very specific in your reports as developers may need to replicate the exact steps you took to get that bug or glitch happen again. If you’re giving more work for the developer than you’re helping them they will let you go and won’t hire you for any more game testing jobs.
There are two types of bugs: the ones you can replicate and the ones which are completely random. Some specific actions on certain parts of the scenario will trigger bugs that the developers would easily miss. You need to let them know which location, character, items and the exact steps you took to let programmers actually recreate the bug in order to fix it. But your game testing duties don’t stop on big bugs. If you find certain textures out of place, misspelling or any sound or music errors you need to let them know. Think of it as your own creation: you’ll want it to be perfect, right?
This last part is up to whether you actually have the time to do it or not. If there’s still a good amount of time before the headline you should try and play the game again to make sure that you didn’t miss anything along the way. With big games having the chance of doing that is impossible, but if you can, it’s a great way of getting a more detailed report. As you’re writing your final report you must make sure that you are using up every single piece of information you took on your play through. On each area try to go from the major bugs to smaller ones as developers would prefer to start focusing on the bigger problems.
If you follow these guidelines you’re sure to have everything it takes to actually know how to be a world class video game tester. Sure, it’s quite a bit of work but if your love is playing video games then this shouldn’t really be a problem. The main issue people usually find is getting those video game testing jobs. So, get the best help on how to become a video game tester and get your first game testing job faster than ever.