Recent content by Ad_Astra_

My list is a bit...extensive. Still, I'll throw them in since I haven't seen them added yet. Basically the entire Kenway family. Connor has my heart though. Ezio as well. Kind of hard to go through three games without developing a bit of a crush. I'm a sucker for these two blond...

I've seen people make a career of it, but I don't know how much longer I personally will be doing it because I'm pretty burnt out after 4 years. When we are in crunch, I see people in my office who never get to see their kids or significant others because of how brutal it can be. My boyfriend is...

Yeah, what we do is more manual. I'm sure the dev QA team probably has more automated tests given that they have access to every build made, but with outside QA it's more hands-on. I've dabbled with TestComplete on my own before, but that was when I was attempting to get into development prior...

There are plenty of tools we use to capture screenshots and crash dumps, etc. Anyone can report a bug, but without evidence that it actually happened or where in the game, there is little the devs can do to fix it. I'm not sure what you mean by "manual" testing. Testing a game is us playing the...

I appreciate your concern, but I opened this thread to talk about the job itself, not go into glorious detail over my projects. Keeping things vague is the best way to avoid breaking an NDA. Giving people information about the process itself I think helps put things into perspective for people...

It's hard, but not impossible. While I've been cursed out, I've also been personally thanked by a few as well. However when you have a ton of deadlines and multi-million dollar IP on the line, it's a bit....tense. Submissions are expensive so it is important to pass them the first time around...

I have been to the SDCC twice now and while it's definitely a great experience, it's too expensive and a bit too crazy now to justify a third go-round. I would recommend everyone try to go once for the sheer excitement. No, it's not great for the "hardcore" crowd, but it's nice to see so many...

Some devs more than others. The more..."artistic" devs like to think of QA that is not in-house as just a bunch of corporate pencil-pushers. I have been cursed out in a database before. However, that usually ends badly for the dev because they are supposed to be professional toward us as we are...

It depends on what the devs think is more important for launch and what can be patched. With AC:U, the missing heads thing was weird, but outside of breaking immersion, it didn't break gameplay. Functionality is always the top tier for us. Find a functionality bug and the team lead starts making...

As someone else already answered, time is one of the biggest factors because time is money and the more time we have to spend on a game, the worse our producers feel about it. It is not the only factor though. QA is a team of editors. We only point out the flaws in the code. The devs...

I love my team an awful lot. I've been on 72 hour work weeks for the past 4 months (finally got a break since I switched projects) so it helps to like the people you work with. However, some of the bugs are just AMAZINGLY bad. Some of the placeholders are also cool if you have creative devs. One...

I think that it depends on the game itself, but also what exactly they are getting upset over. Functionality bugs, progression blockers, save-deletes...all of those are totally reasonable in my opinion. Those should not happen in a finished project, but the fact of that matter is that both the...

You have to live near a tester office location for starters. A lot of people think that you can test from your home, but they forget that when dealing with sensitive IP, you can't just let it out into the open like that. You have to either already be living close by or be willing to move out to...

Most maps start out with basic geometry and whatever textures chosen by the designers. All assets are added in separately (hence why you will see a lot of things clipping into the ground). The first goal of any map is to lay out the field of play and contain the users within it with physics...

Well we test the game based on what is capable of being tested on the current build. The devs send us builds whenever they have changed anything. So the first builds they send us tend to be VERY rough and unfinished. Lots of placeholder textures, no cutscenes, sometimes no models for certain...