Shipping Video Games Faster With Test Automation
✨Indies!✨ — Reach out to me on social media or through automateyour.games for a 25% discount!
About the course
Intrigued about how other game studios are shipping faster using test automation? Already started with automation but want to make sure you have the right grounding?
Join this online workshop with gamedev and automation consultant Andrew Fray and learn the pragmatic ways you can add even just a little automation to start seeing benefits straight away.
Well-implemented automation, even a small amount, can bring useful benefits to any team, including:
Increasing stability, allowing you to playtest earlier and add features later
Freeing QA time to focus on destructive testing and qualitative feedback, rather than monotonous checklists
Faster iteration, giving you a safety net for deep changes
What you'll learn
In this workshop, you'll learn about the most useful test types for beginners:
Asset tests: validating on-disk data like textures, meshes and game data to catch bugs before the game even boots
Smoke tests: holistic tests that are simple to create and maintain
Actor tests: ensuring the functionality of gameplay code with minimal dependencies
We'll build each of those tests into an existing project that wasn't designed for test automation, ending the day having learned a whole lot and implemented some production-quality tests. (The example project will be Unity, but there's enough foundational knowledge to make this useful for any type of game developer)
You'll finish the day understanding:
The benefits of test automation for teams of all sizes and budgets
The fail-fast-fail-hard mindset, and the benefits that mindset brings even if you don't do any automation
The three most useful test types and when to use them
What types of tests to avoid
How to structure good tests to make them readable, maintainable and trustworthy
I've run a three-day version of this workshop for multiple games studios, but I wanted to make it available for as wide an audience as possible. This version is lean and focused to get you writing useful automation as quickly as possible. If you are an indie, you might qualify for a 25% discount - see more below.
Who you are
Programmers (including solo devs) who:
want to ship more reliable code that can be iterated on and refactored more easily
want to get the most out of their limited QA budgets
Aspiring QA Engineers or SDETs who:
can already program a little
have access to project source
want to be empowered to solve their own problems
Prerequisites:
You should have some programming knowledge, but you don't have to be an expert
You are someone who has access to project source code
You should have a functional understanding of game engines in general. If you have an existing understanding of Unity, you'll get slightly more out of the day.
You don't need any pre-existing knowledge of test automation
You don't need to be from any particular size of studio - this automation approach can scale to work for one-person indies or for much larger teams
You should have a relatively private space from which to attend an all-day virtual workshop
✨Indies!✨ — Reach out to me on social media or through automateyour.games for a 25% discount!
What people are saying
I would highly recommend working with Andrew to any team who have a sense that they would get a lot of value from automated testing, but no clear idea where to start.
➡ Ricky Haggett, Designer & Founder, Hollow Ponds
We were delighted with the progress made and are keen to leverage the new skills and processes.
➡ Bruce Heather, Technical Director, Teach Your Monster
Andrew's technical expertise paired with excellent facilitation skills make it easy to continually improve.
➡ Sean Sweeny, Senior Software Engineer, Epic Games
I really enjoyed our sessions with Andrew, and would highly recommend him. He's very friendly and approachable, and a patient teacher. He also has a bad-ass Lego collection.
➡ Neil Goodman, Lead Developer, Nerial
About Andrew
Andrew is a BAFTA-winning games programmer, lead and automation consultant with over two decades of experience in the industry. He's worked on both AAA and indie titles, on genres from racing to puzzle, shipping on PC, console, and mobile. Notable titles include Rollerdrome, Alphabear and Rollercoaster Tycoon 3.
Since writing his first shipping test in 2010, Andrew has implemented processes, created build servers, trained teams and written tests, both as a lead and as a consultant.
Andrew chairs the Automated Testing roundtables at GDC, which he founded in 2015, and has spoken around the world on test automation in video games.