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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games
@andrewfray.dev

if you'd like more stability in your game and less monotonous QA work, but figured automated tests were complicated and a big investment, you should check out 🌟asset tests!🌟 but first let me tell you about an exploding barrel bug🧵

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games
@andrewfray.dev

one day we get a bug: a specific red barrel on level 3 is not exploding when shot. that's important! we all know that if your barrels don't explode, it's not a real video game, it's just a sparkling spreadsheet. luckily, only the barrel's layer was wrong. flip it back, submit, claim fixed.

Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games
@andrewfray.dev

...but to QA, that's not a simple bug. if one barrel has the wrong layer, maybe more do? Maybe we should explode every barrel in the game, to double-check? Maybe we should do that before every release? Their checklist has just grown a little bit with a task that’s repetitive and error-prone. 🫠

Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games
@andrewfray.dev

yay 🌈asset tests🌈 an asset test looks at data on disk – blueprint configuration values, prefab variables, texture compression values, static mesh properties, etc. because these tests don't touch gameplay logic, they are normally very simple to write – almost always just a line or two.