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By designerdougm
On 23, Feb 2012 | No Comments | In QA | By designerdougm
Requiem
Created over a period of just over six months and 1200 man hours Requiem was one of the primary four of eight senior thesis projects that I provided lead QA for during my senior year at Champlain College.
The Project
Requiem is a vertical shooter choreographed to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s musical work, “Requiem.” In an effort to break the genre out of it’s hardcore-only niche, Requiem sheds the trappings of the archaic game loop that often leaves players at an impasse. Instead, Requiem was designed to encouraged players through a performance based reward system that promotes skillful play and provides a variety of player upgrades to help them overcome obstacles.
Requiem appeals to both the hardcore and casual gamer with scalable difficulty and drop-in, drop-out multiplayer.
- Six months
- 1200 man hours
- One Producer
- Two Designers
- Four Artists
- Two Programmers
- One QA Lead
The Team
- Producer / Designer – Joel Pelletier
- Lead Artist – Dan Peavey
- Lead Designer – Auston Montville
- Artist – Taylor Bjorndahl
- Artist – Dan Hart
- Artist – Husam Al-Ziab
- Designer – Rob Witbeck
- Programmer – Alex Tabor
- Lead QA – Douglas Miller
- Assistant Programmer – Dan Rossi
- Cinematic Artist – Ryan Fitton
Requiem could not have been made without the hard work of numerous tremendously talented individuals, all of whom it was my great pleasure to work with.
My Role
- Responsible for dozens of testers on 7 simultaneous projects
- Testers were not provided, used social networking to attract testers
- Performed validation (expectation) and verification (bug) testing
- Kept track of testers to provide fresh eyes or repeat testers as needed
- Wide range of testers provided feedback helped Requiem appeal to a broad audience
- Data was used to balance difficulty, itemization costs and speed up iteration
In-depth look at my role
As Quality Assurance Lead I was responsible for both personally testing the game as well as organizing dozens of individual testers on Requiem and 7 other titles over the course of half an academic year. I was brought onto the project in order to provide the quality feedback and testing necessary help the design team craft a finely tuned and polished experience. Using tools like Facebook and Twitter I organized and executed bi-weekly testing sprints with a pool of testers that included colleagues in the game development program, as well as students from other majors and even non-gamers. This wide range of testers allowed for the depth and breadth of feedback that the design team required to build a vertical shooter that could shed it’s genre constraints and appeal to a broader audience.
Employing a variety of methods I was able to provide verification testing to catch game-breaking bugs and validation testing to help balance the game’s design against the user’s expectations. The bug-tracking solution Unfuddle was employed for ticket creation and management. Organization played a crucial role in my work, as compiling the large amount of qualitative feedback my team generated into something concise and easily accessible for the design team was paramount. Consulting the team on a regular basis was necessary, and my and the QA team’s feedback was used to help balance difficulty and fine-tune upgrade potency as well as to tweak itemization costs. The frequency and quality of the feedback I provided allowed the rest of the development team to iterate much more quickly than they would have otherwise been able to. In addition to my role as Lead QA I also assisted in minor polishing efforts late in the production cycle, including providing scripting solutions.
Windows .EXE
41.4 MB
