How do i become a video game tester?

[alexanderherbt]

I've always been interested and curious about how you go about becoming a video game designer, I play all different kinds of games and excel in almost every one, I've won a few Video game competitions and play games to beat them and set records.


Mod edit: Of course, this guy's a spammer. But, the conversation's actually interesting, so we'll just ban this joker, remove the spammity link, and let you folks keep talking. ~Umbran

 

[Baumi]

Welcome to the board!

Do you want to become a Tester or Designer? In neither of these does your skill really matter (it only matters in e-sport), only that you play often and different kind of games.

Anyway I wouldn't recommend becoming a Game-Tester, it's a really boring job. Even if you want to work for Magazine to write Reviews (thats a bit more interesting than just testing the same things over and over) you don't have much fun playing these games since you rarely have the choice of the games you have to play and you always have to rush things.

Game Designer seems to be much more interesting choice, but I'm sure you have to study to get into this kind of work.

 

[jonesy]

I've won a few Video game competitions and play games to beat them and set records.

Yeah, that's not really a quality game houses look for in a tester. Sometimes when the target audience is family or just plain everyone it's actually better if you're not that good with it to begin with so they might actually get data on the learning curve.

 

[Aurumvorax]

It's a simple matter of researching the company you like, seeing if they're hiring, then applying for the job. Big companies like Blizzard and EA almost always have positions available. They'll explain what skills they're looking for and what kind of work you're expected to do.

Being a tester isn't as simple as "sit around, play games all day." In most cases it requires critical thinking and creative writing skills. Stress testing requires accurate bug reports and note taking.

 

[Asmor]

Anyway I wouldn't recommend becoming a Game-Tester, it's a really boring job.

With the caveat that I only did it for about 3 months (they laid off 2/3 of the QA testers 3 days before Christmas without warning, and shut the local studio down a couple weeks later), I have to disagree there.

Don't get any illusions that it's all fun all the time. It's a job, plain and simple, but as far as jobs go it's pretty nice.

That said, there are reasons to avoid it. They work you hard, which may be good or bad depending. Benefits are all but non-existent, and you usually have at least a 60-hour work week. You do get time and a half for the overtime, though, so it's not bad money for a recent graduate...

As far as how to get the job? Just put in an application. It's more an issue of timing and location. You don't need any real skills, you just need to live in the right area and have an application in their files when they decide to start looking for more people.

 

[Piratecat]

Imagione playing an incredibly buggy game until you experience a crash, then going back and re-playing one section twenty times until you're able to recreate that crash. That's QA. It's challenging, but it's also an excellent entrance into the industry because it teaches you how to think critically about games, and how to build levels that eliminate common bugs like collision errors.

 

[lin_fusan]

Most game tester jobs requires you to be able to show up on time every day, put in your 8 hours (maybe more for overtime during crunch periods), and be willing to get paid minimum wage.

I've seen a push for testers to become more professional by learning methodologies and for planning a career in QA by going up to a Lead position, and some job postings are even asking for programming experience. This may be good for the profession by raising the level of quality in its workers, but it also might increase the requirements for what used to be an entry-level position.

People used to see QA as a way into the video game industry. Since it didn't require specific skills and experience, you can earn that experience in the job. Like I mentioned above, there seems to be a push to raise the bar now.

As for a designer, that's a bit harder. The easiest thing is for you to make a game on your off time, be it a board game, RPG hack, flash game, or a mod. Simply demonstrate an ability to make games. Bonus skill sets include having a mathy background, a programming background, and a visual design background (making UI's or graphics themselves). Actually, having a wide variety of experiences helps too.

Having done QA for several years, doing "narrative design" for a couple years, and been looking for work as a game designer, I must say QA is easier to get into, but the majority of people in QA want to get out of QA.

 

[Janx]

I worked 13 years for a QA organization. hardware and software. Not games, but I have some insight into that industry as well.

Different organizations have different ideas about the kind of people they hire for testing. But it all still comes down to using features, indentifying spots a bug could occur, trying it, documenting it, reproducing it, and later retesting that the bug was fixed.

Generally, you want people who are detail oriented, because you need to be able to spot sublt bugs, not just blaringly obvious crashes that anybody who presses the Start button could find.

A lot of times this means trying the same thing over and over again, with subtle variation.

It'll mean keeping good notes and writing up a detailed description. How you write a bug report can determine how serious it seems. Furthermore, if the developer can't reproduce it, he'll CND it (Can Not Duplicate) and it'll be closed. You don't want too many bogus bugs in your name in the bug tracking tool.

I started in QA, doing testing. I did manage to move out of it into development, where my degree was. Most folks don't. Where I was at, they hired all college grads. That's expensive. The trend is to hire leads as college grads and give them contractors (non-graduates aka cheap labor) to do the testing for them while they wrote test plans and oversaw the work.

In a game company, your chances of getting out of QA into something better is less, especially if you're not degreed.

Consider the stereotypical game tester: no college degree, minimal if any formal programming experience. If you're working fulltime, your not going to learn to program on the job.

A friend of mine apppied for a programming job at EA. They sent him a take home test first. It was involving complex mathematics for 3d rendering. The short of it was, a guy who knew how to code for databases, drivers, and firmware couldn't do it. It takes a certain sub-set of programmer to do graphics programming.

Game programming requires very optimized for speed code. I had one developer on the team from Broderbund. Her coding habits were geared for that, which made for unreadable code.

Generally, game designers come from the ranks of programmers, or level designers. People who have experience in making the games generally know how to make more games.

If you want to get into that, go check out XNA which is the free dev-kit for writing xbox games (and windows games).

In general, I wouldn't hire a kid to design a game for me if he didn't have a portfolio of games in the genre I wanted. for video games, that means you need to make software. the tools are free. So anybody who doesn't do it is just a wannabe, and not serious.

 

[Asmor]

So anybody who doesn't do it is just a wannabe, and not serious.

Harsh, but accurate.

It used to be that mods were a good way to make a name for yourself. They still are, but with the bastardization of PC games as second-rate consolse games (why hello thar, Call of Duty!), there are fewer and fewer big-name games out there with active modding communities.