Bug-testing and play testing methods

Hi all

I'm nearing the 80% completion of Act 1 of my game and am currently going through lots of play testing and bug fixes and tweaking of dialog.

The problem I'm having is the need to write some pretty complex conditional if statements just to setup certain scenes so they behave and look as if I've completed lots of other actions/pickups/combinations in other scenes, just so I can test them properly. I don't want to have to play through the first 45 minutes of my game every-time to get to the scene I want to tweak.

I just wondered whether anyone else has any methodology for testing or setting up a robust way of being able to progress through your game, or leap to particular "moments in time" within your story to test certain elements?

Would save games function correctly here within my dev version, if I'm adding new things as i test?

I thought this might be an interesting thread to gather other peoples ideas and methods for testing?

Hi.

You can use the command editor (I don't know it's real name). Use the tab-button in the player and set some conditions true or false, change the charakters, put some items you need and a lot more you can test. So you won't have to play the first 45 minutes if you can set the values or the conditions immediately you need to play the next 45 minutes.
By the way: testing a programmed system is hard work!!! Always!

Machtnix

I would create some functions & tables with lua script to quickly select scenes, conditions & values etc.

Much quicker to type out what you need into tables than messing about with 5 million actions & action parts in the vs editor.

I can't think of an example off the top of my head to write up at the minute, mind.

What i usually do is add all items that i need, and change the conditions i like, at the start action of the game.
I guess this is quite simple to do, but gets harder to do as your game gets bigger. AFRLme has a point though. You can right a script, and gradually add whatever changes need to occur each time you need to test something new. I will try that as well.

I think one of the problems I have is in my initial planning and implementation of the scenes

A number of the scenes in my game are re-visited over time after certain parts of the story have taken place, after the character costume has changed, after doors have been opened, places un-covered, lights turned on etc, all of which effect the placement, status and appearance of items in these rooms

I'm doing lots of conditional checking on a few of my rooms for lots of different things, when in retrospect, it would have been more sensible to actually create 3 or 4 separate versions of the same room, rather than a huge "on enter scene" action in the one room.

That way its easier to track a single timeline of when you should enter cave v1, v2,v3 based on a single value or condition.

Hope this retrospective tip, helps someone!