What is the difference between alpha and beta tests? This developer diary entry describes my take on alpha and beta testing of games.

 

Quality assurance

The time for testing Mad Skills Motocross has come. Testing is really, really important for every piece of software to ensure its correctness, completeness, efficiency, usability, portability, maintainability, capability, reliability, and compatibility. All those conditions are important when developing a software system that for example a hospital will rely on. Any business-critical system should in fact be thoroughly tested for all of the above.

All of those, with a few exceptions, can be (but should not be)  tested by the developers or their Quality Assurance department alone. Usability for example is best ensured by testing the software on the actual target group of users.

Anyhoo, I would like to state that games are a bit different in that most of them do not need to be tested for all of the above criteria. Certainly the compatibility and usability criteria are very important, but correctness and completeness aren’t as vital.

In addition, games need to be tested for the fun factor. This might be the most important criteria for games, if the game is fun enough the players might put up with horrible usability for instance. I know, using the term fun factor is a bit pretentious, it could be included in either the usability or correctness criterion. I feel, however, that its importance grants it the right to stand on its own.

Note: everything I write in this diary entry is my own take on testing and should not be viewed as an instruction on testing software. I merely want to describe how the testing of Mad Skills Motocross will be conducted. I am no expert on quality assurance and I might be wrong on a lot of the things I write here. So take it with a pinch of salt.

Alpha

Testing how fun a game is should of course be done by a selection of the actual target group, the players who are likely to enjoy this kind of game. Here on Turborilla, the development department (that’s me) defines an alpha as an “early version which is not feature-complete nor content-complete and mostly exists to test how fun the core mechanic of the game is, but also the compatibility with different computer setups”.

What that means is in a nutshell that I don’t trust myself in judging whether the core machanic is fun or not. I need actual players to tell me what is fun, what is boring and how things can be improved. At this stage of development I have most likely become blind to the flaws of my own product.

The first alpha contains a couple of playable levels and is horribly unpolished and, to be frank, not very fun at all. It is up to the testers to try to see the potential of the gameplay even though most of the basics of game design is not there yet (rewards, challenges, a sense of progress).

New features and content suggested by the testers during alpha might make it into the game. The goals of alpha-testing is to make sure the core gameplay is fun and make plans for additional features. This is very different from the goals of beta-testing.

Beta

The beta version should be feature-complete and ready to release if it weren’t for all the bugs that have inevitably been introduced during the implementation of all the features. The beta-testing of Turborilla’s games is all about squashing bugs.

The goal is for the game to be completely free of bugs at the end of beta. That is probably impossible, but aim high and you might just get there.

No new features will be introduced during beta, since that would also produce new bugs. Suggested features are written down and will be considered after the game is released.

Release

After release the game goes into a kind of alpha again. How do we make it even more fun? What features would be really cool?

The alpha-beta-release cycle will continue for as long as people are still buying the game.

In closing

That’s all for now, please discuss and ask questions in the forums, and I will try to answer them as best I can. Also, if you have any ideas that might improve the game, don’t hesitate to bring it up in the forums.

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Take care
// Tobias
Turborilla Games

These diary entries are here for you, the readers. So I would like to know what you think, what you would like to see in the future, and any ideas and questions you might have really.

I have created a forum topic just for this diary entry: discuss here

 

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