The importance of building tools.

The more you make the easier development gets.
Build early, build often.

Watch the stream here:

#Shorts #Heartbound #Twitch

[levar]

Yeah, i remeber working as tester for one cimpany, at one point they made tools for testers that let them skip days and quests in that game so we found A LOT of bugs but we realised that those bugs were caused by tools XD

[Xiroxys]

Test your product... by using your product.

As someone in QA, please... please do this.

[Ankhrea]

Was that a .thor file extension on the save file? Lol

[cad]

The flip side is when making dev tooling, that tooling can inform end user functionality. E.g. how Mario Maker is (allegedly) a near direct evolution of internal level building tools at Nintendo. E.g. in-game camera systems are often related to tools used for capturing promotional material for the game. E.g. replays are highly valuable both for bug reproduction and for player study.

[Villanite]

So glad this was discussed. As an engineering lead, there were few things as frustrating as learning that one of my engineers missed a major problem because they were bypassing the user experience and kept testing specific logic in a vacuum. Lazy practice with minimal benefits.

[haydench]

Just the way he explained that is so friendly, he’s the type of person that if you were to have as a teacher there are no dumb questions in that classroom

[dvod]

Bro somehow fixed his hair at the end of the video and it looked literally no different when the veideo started over lol

[MrOniro]

As someone who works in QA: This, 1000%. That's the best way to avoid debug only issues.

[Cfomodz]

This is so freaking genius on a level I will never be able to adequately articulate..

We get this wrong so often and it’s so obvious when it comes back a week later to bite you and they ask, “didn’t you check it?” And you have to look them in the eyes and be like.. no… we always skipped the getting out of bed but so we didn’t have to watch it 100 times.. and they’re like, “it’s 4 and a half seconds! And now we’re out half a day to debug the problem you would have caught” but in the moment you never know if you are trying to take shortcuts.

The amount of respect I have for this man’s work ethic is off the charts.

[zomboekiller]

If this is how game devs at big companies were as excited about their job, as this man. we would have amazing games every month

[steven]

I had to learn this the hard way myself. Building a save/load feature is important in testing. Its one of the first things you should build out.

[AhNoWiC]

I watched your video on getting people to watch your shorts and now you're constantly recommended. I'm not complaining, you seem like a very interesting dude with stories to tell.

[IceifritGaming]

I made a game with my daughter for a game jam and we tested it extensively.... Turns out all of our testing was done in a way that never revealed the biggest bug of all.

The game didn't resize properly. It made it so players couldn't even get past the first screen because the button to press was located off their screen if they're settings weren't exactly the same as mine😅

[Chrisdena_]

As a QA Game Tester, I totally support games built this way.

[fivetriplezero]

This is why AAA games will sometime respond to user errors with a message like "we checked and everything seems to work fine" Even if you as a player can recreate the bug consistently. They just flip a switch, hit a button, and it loads up fine, but it doesn't do that when the game is playing normally.

[juampyvarela]

This is a good solution for personal/small team projects.
If we were in a big team/open source/mod API/anual franchise where you don't start from scratch every year, this could lead to the system asking for precise internal knowledge (which can lead to abandonware and increased development time).
In those scenarios, a dev tool that let's you create/modify save files (a ui with tooltips for every value, drop-down menus for enumerators, etc) would be a better solution.
One could also argue that testing corrupt data is a good way to make sure game breaking bugs are rare. This is because testing for devs can become monotonous and lead to just "checking if the basic flow works". That's where QA comes in and tests correctly 😊

[viazzi]

My brain is so rotted by memes, when I heard "the save file" I thought "is stored in the balls"

[sagetarus]

I'm building an app for the biology researchers at my university (as well as elsewhere when it's released). It's the first time I've ever done software development and I only had a CS degree from the same uni.

I made a debug script that would preload all the initial setup and files in the backend of the app programatically so I didn't have to keep using the UI. The amount of times a researcher would go to use the app and a stupid simple bug was there when entering the data manually was ridiculous. I learned to only use my debug script for making/testing new features, and ALWAYS doing a full run through with many different parameters before releasing it regardless of whether I believed I had made a breaking/relevant change or not.

TL;DR: This is a very important and fundamental concept that goes farther than just making games.

[Lightmagician]

honestly using your Save system as your debug menu. cheeky

[Malevolent_bacon]

You are blessed, I'm glad you treat it fully with the respect it deserves. <3