Mar 27, 2018
Worlds Adrift - Bossa Julia
Hi Travellers,
It’s Damien again, QA Manager for Bossa Studios.
One of the common questions we get asked with respect to QA on Worlds Adrift is how we actually go about testing “the world”, namely the sandbox which you explore in the game.
Just take that statement for one second, this is a sandbox which is made up of hundreds of islands over a geographical distance the size of a small country. How do we actually test that to ensure it works when the players are let in?
There’s a number of elements to testing the game world, due to the sheer scale of the world, we have to break down the world into its constituent parts, namely:
- Validating individual islands (Content Curation)
- Testing the World Map
- Performance and Scale Testing
- Gameplay Islands
Content Curation
The first part of the process of verifying the game world works correctly is to break it down to individual elements, namely the islands. This is done primarily through the Island Creator by our design team, who verify that the island is viable for the game (such as size, complexity, spaces for playing shipyards amongst others). Through this process, we identify which biome the island is viable for in order to ensure consistency for each region, if the island is viable. Once we have looked at the island and it can go into the game, we then export the island for incorporating into a new world map.Testing the World Map
Once the islands have been exported and the new world map is in game, this is where the QA team take over when the new world is in game. During testing for the 0.1.9 release, the first thing we focused on was the gameplay objects as even though they might have worked in the Island Creator- this was not a given that it would also work in game! We focussed on islands containing all of the various gameplay elements and made sure that they worked correctly, as with these kinds of gameplay elements and this type of game, if it works for a small number of islands then it should work across the entire game world.In addition to the content itself, we also have to validate that the dynamic music works correctly (the music changes when you travel between regions and when you go through storm walls, wind walls or sand storms), weather systems work correctly, creatures vary behaviourally between regions, amongst many others. You can think of it as the world itself is the core of the game, and all other gameplay systems are build from that- the world is that crucial to the game.
Performance and Scale Testing
In addition to making sure that the world works functionally, the other aspect we have to consider when testing the game world is also verifying the game will work with all users and also with a large number of players are in the game- this is where performance and scale testing come into play.Performance testing is done by the QA team through the game client in a very exploratory fashion. As the game stream loads in islands as you move through the world, we monitor client and server performance in order to make sure that they remain consistent, regardless of where you are. One issue we commonly see when testing the game world is that if you are on an island and you rotate the camera around, it works fine when you look in one direction, but not if you rotate the camera around where it could suddenly drop without reason. This is usually an issue to having too many islands within a small area, in that they are all visible at the same time- more polygons on screen mean there is more to process, and this affects the frame rate. We typically will address this by amending the world map, moving islands further apart or moving them around. This is the difference between the Island Creator, which focuses on a single island, and the game, which contains many islands, where we need to check content multiple times before it is released.
As I have said in a previous blog, we test Worlds Adrift at scale by using automated load testing, simulating large numbers of game clients in the game world. The automated “bots” actually traverse the entire world performing simple actions such as harvesting materials, and as these load test run with the required number of players which we need to support, we monitor performance metrics such as latency (the time it takes to send a message between the client and the servers), server memory and CPU utilisation to make sure that with the new game world, the game runs for an entire maintenance cycle.
Gameplay Islands
For 0.1.9, an additional layer to testing the world environment was added with the map refresh, which were islands containing gameplay elements made by players, such as unclimbable surfaces and spikes amongst others, which we introduced in the Island Creator update in September 2017.The Island Creator is effectively a local (with limited scale and functionality) version of the full game, however because it is local in nature, we cannot use this as a guarantee that it’ll work correctly when it ends up in the full game - therefore we have to make sure that the gameplay elements work in game, and work correctly between different players.
In summary though… the reality is that with a world as huge as what we have, and with so many islands in the game world across four different biomes, we cannot catch all bugs with every island. This is where you can help us, please let us know if you see any floating objects, islands which are inconsistent or do not display correctly in game or generally anything which doesn’t work or look out of place, it goes a long way to improve the quality of the world as the game evolves.
As always, see you in the skies.
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