Features � Staff Diaries: Dan Waldron
At 1.00pm everyone breaks for lunch. Many venture outside or into the local town for lunch, while others remain at their desks to surf the web or to join one of the multiplayer games of Counterstrike or Unreal Tournament or whatever the latest frag fest is. I often choose the mindless slaughter of my workmates over a breath of fresh air! Lunch is one hour, so at 2.00pm it's back to work.
The afternoon follows much the same path as the morning. I continue the hunt for art issues in the first two levels of the game. Later on in the course of the project the focus will move away from art towards game-play and testing for logic and script issues, but it will be important not to disregard the look of the game all together as art bugs and indeed bugs in any aspect of the game, can crop up at any time. For the time being any additional art issues found will be added to the document and relevant comments will be added so the pictured issue will be easier to find again.
It is important for us to be able to clearly explain where and how any issues occurred, as this will greatly cut down the time spent by the artist/programmer when they come to fix the issue. This may not seem significant for individual issues, but every hour wasted trying to reproduce an issue has a knock-on effect, especially when you consider that there may be thousands of issues to fix over the year or so the game is in test.
As the end of the day approaches, I begin to finish off the work of the day. All of the problems found are added to the document and it is sent to the Producer. I eventually venture homeward at 6.00pm.
So there you have it. Just an average day in the life of the QA department. Over the course of the coming year the workload will increase and sometime after Christmas the overtime will begin again. But for now, I am looking forward to the summer party at the end of the week and a well deserved two-week break in September!
Bye for now!
Dan.
The afternoon follows much the same path as the morning. I continue the hunt for art issues in the first two levels of the game. Later on in the course of the project the focus will move away from art towards game-play and testing for logic and script issues, but it will be important not to disregard the look of the game all together as art bugs and indeed bugs in any aspect of the game, can crop up at any time. For the time being any additional art issues found will be added to the document and relevant comments will be added so the pictured issue will be easier to find again.
It is important for us to be able to clearly explain where and how any issues occurred, as this will greatly cut down the time spent by the artist/programmer when they come to fix the issue. This may not seem significant for individual issues, but every hour wasted trying to reproduce an issue has a knock-on effect, especially when you consider that there may be thousands of issues to fix over the year or so the game is in test.
As the end of the day approaches, I begin to finish off the work of the day. All of the problems found are added to the document and it is sent to the Producer. I eventually venture homeward at 6.00pm.
So there you have it. Just an average day in the life of the QA department. Over the course of the coming year the workload will increase and sometime after Christmas the overtime will begin again. But for now, I am looking forward to the summer party at the end of the week and a well deserved two-week break in September!
Bye for now!
Dan.
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