Game Quality

4:05 PM

Games coming out of the Level Up! Fun factory goes through a stringent test of quality assurance before it is made available to the public. The following is a broad illustration of these test components

Having the elements of the game identified, these modules are tested against several permutations depending on the module requirements and on the phase of the testing. Games normally go through several levels of testing phases before it goes launch (alpha, internal beta, limited beta, open beta) and with this comes several combinations.
Focusing on the game play testing dyanmics for example, we test them against feature instances like the following:

• Resources (levels, attacks, tacit features, abilities, skills, progressions, game world, etc.)
• Goals (win-conditions, lose-conditions, quests, etc.)
• Obstacles (oponnents, limits, time, terrain, rules, etc)

• Rewards

With this macro perspective are several variations of the feature tested against/with the other features to ensure the following;

• Playability

• Enjoyability

• Game Balance

• Community Balance

With Perfect World, we have features that were given to us and information that we gathered on our own labors. Suffice to say we are confident with the infra and the system modules. Initial testing of the game play and content modules are extensively being tested right now prior to getting the English client. With game play tests we have Chinese listed features tested against a Chinese client. We measure expected output from the module permutation with the actual game feature. Once we get the English client, the same methodology shall be applied but with a more thorough process since conversations are now understood and barriers to communication eliminated.

Translation snags

Game localization has always been a very challenging task for game publishers. With our experience from translating games from Korea, this batch of content from China is definitely the biggest challenge so far.

Our process of translating from one language to another actually runs on a tested and proven methodology from the past games. What hits us in pre-production is definitely the volume of content that needs to be localized.

When placed in an excel grid, the actual content is more than half a million lines of Chinese characters, and that only accounts for the quest script and proper nouns. Other items that were localized include buttons, game interface, maps, etc.

I’ll be posting interesting texts that we encountered during our phase of directly translating it from Chinese to simple English.