A comprehensive insight of how Kevin A., the tester QA of Million Victories, approaches his work, and more.
Q: What’s your mission in Million Victories?
K: Doing debugs on many processes that actually improve the workflow and productivity of the devs.
Q: And how do these improvements affect the gameplay and experience of Million Lords?
K: Basically my work appears directly through the game
Q: Do you encounter any challenges in your mission? For example, mastering the whole process of game development.
K: I don’t think I have any particular difficult processes, as much I do have the abilities to look into it, especially that my job’s hierarchy is well organized, and I do things in the most correct way. The processes I follow asks for being very rigorous into respecting the proceedings of the smoke tests, where I index all my actions and tasks, so I can figure out which ones do work. This action is a bit complicated for those that are not familiar with the testing processes.
Q: And which of those smoke test tasks you do, that can be challenging at some points?
K: I don’t have particularly any complicated ones. And speaking of the smoke tests, my approach is to dispatch all the actions onto micro and macro ones. The Macro actions that are main gameplay actions such as attacking, leveling up cities, etc. And the micro
For all this, I use an organization diagram, that allows me to simplify and easily access all the done and to do actions possible.
Q: Which means, the Smoke Test is a very Quality Assurance approach to testing?
K: Exactly, it’s the way we use to find all the tests possible on the game, that helps to find the bugs.
Q: Can you tell us about your profile and your background in the gaming industry, so we can understand how someone like you can start in this domain?
K: So first of all, this is my first professional experience here, where I started as an intern. I did a bachelor in Game Design, where I studied a variety of subjects about the domain, and at my last year in the curriculum, I did manage a group of 12 persons, where I did learn a lot of things, such as how to manage, prepare support tools, documentation, etc. Also, the QA testing where I discovered the JIRA Solution, that allows to create bugs tickets and report it to the concerned member of the team.
This last year in the bachelor course is what gave me that versatility at handling a lot of matter in the video game development.
Q: And basically, it’s being versatile and having the idea of how the QA can be done, that qualified you for your actual position in the team?
K: Yes, knowing a bit of everything, and discussing with all the poles of the team, gives me more insights of how each one does his work, which help a lot in my testings.
Q: And then from your exchanges with the whole team, you did manage to optimize your ways. Could you tell us some of your advanced techniques for testing?
K: It’s the tools and documents creation that help me organize a lot my work, that I can qualify as the optimized way of doing the QA Testing: It helps me reducing the time of tests, automatizing some calculations through Excel, that help to verify and validating some data collected from the experimentations. And through these tools, I can execute simulations of how things can be by changing the parameters of the game.
Q: Can you give us any advice for aspiring testers QA?
K: Yes, get interested in the development, and taking the habit of participating in early access and beta games, even Alpha accesses, and testing the games directly in the studio’s headquarters. Getting interested in the testing
And then working a bit on its own rigor, being more applied into thy methodology.
Q: And what’s your actual favorite game right now?
K: That’s a very complicated question [laughter], I mean right now I’m very onto Dead Space II, with its mix of horror and action, but I’ll say also Warframe, which’s a totally awesome F2P game on PC, that I highly enjoy for its very diverse gameplay.
