sonofableep

my thoughts have recently turned to playtesting and QA’ing (QA-ing?  doing QA for?) audio.  the time has come for me to decide how to approach it this time around, and how to avoid the pitfalls of previous audio QA experiences.  but it’s 2:00 am now, so instead of composing anything lengthy & constructive, how ’bout i just be brief & negative by recounting one of those avoidable pitfalls?  besides, short & nasty is always more fun.  at this hour, the alternative feels like homework.

there’s a couple things that i’ve found to be true about QA.  the first is, most of the time they’re working, they’re looking at very specific issues.  not necessarily with blinders on, but they’re focused – they get in game, check what they’ve got to check, and get out.  in, out, in, out…the game is not usually up for hours and hours at a stretch, unless whatever it is they’re looking at *is* some kind of longplay issue (memory leak, etc.).

the second thing is, they’re usually not listening to the game unless listening to the game *is* the specific issue they’re working on.  otherwise, nope.  and i don’t blame them…in their place i wouldn’t either.  they’re in, out, in, and out of the game (intro music 50x/day?  no thanks.).  they’re probably situated in the middle of a cube farm, not wanting to annoy / be annoyed by others with the sound of the game.  really, why would you *not* just listen to your iPod all day?

which brings us to this particular pitfall.  combine thing #1 and thing #2, and the odds of a QA person still listening to audio into the 4th hour of gameplay are pretty low.  but as it turns out, once upon a time that’s exactly what we needed.  some kind of loopy audio memory leak that took hours to fully manifest itself (in the form of audio gradually disappearing in chunks – first the footsteps, then maybe the weapons, then maybe the voices…until it was all gone) went out the front door unnoticed.

well, unnoticed by *us*.  about, oh, four hours after that patch went out we started getting hundreds of bug reports about odd audio behavior, dropouts, total silence, the works.  so people come running to me, “what the hell did you DO?”.  we fire up the game, let it run for several hours with all the audio turned on, and golly gee shucks lookit that!  the sucker fell silent, just like all the players out there (and none of us in here) found it would.

so when i get around to composing the long & constructive diatribe about playtesting and QA’ing, there’s sure to be a bullet point distilled from that anecdote: play like a player – for a loooooong time, and occasionally listening to the game.  :)