PART 3: GAME TESTER

All hail your intelligent graphic artists. You gave us more reason to play games.

Video Creation with Testers


A video game during the creation and design phase is being made by a group of people. Although it is a different set of details in the game, they do tend to work very directly even from the beginning.



Graphic artists make all the things you see. They use very costly and large programs to illustrate and generate state of art in a game - graphics. First and foremost, they need to be an artist with a portfolio of their very unique art, also, computer literacy is a must have to be able to handle programs the company uses for their designing process. Lastly, they need to be familiar with video games and how the art and graphics are used in them. It makes perfect sense as you need to be a gamer to only understand what a gamer really wants from a game.

Next we have the programmer who creates the game engine that runs the game or works on an existing engine to change it to the current game. They work extensively with computers and have a lot of skills with programming and computer languages. This job requires a lot of knowledge and discipline in computers and math.

The level designer takes the game engine and creates the actual worlds that the game is played on and makes the game play that eventually ended up on your screen. He adds the things that the artists create and puts them in the game. People, items, merchants, shops, monsters are basically all the small iconic details that can be found in a game. This gives them things to do, and gives the player the tools to play the game. This job is very difficult as you are the game play of the video game. These guys create how the game is going to run and how much happens to the player at every turn, every detail of it, every surrounding of the character in the game.

Tester then came in the picture to work at seeing that the game runs all right and there are no problems in any area of the game, also commonly known as glitches. Glitches are spots that disappear and will eventually cause the game to fail or other wise disrupt your game play. Their job is basically to identify all such bugs in the game. A tester also plays the game beforehand to make sure the game is playable and can be played for the general audience it is targeted for. He will go through every level and area of the game looking for these glitches and make sure it will be a very smooth game play when the copy is available for the market.

The tester also can be involved with the designers and artists to help make the game better. In some companies they work closely with them to help and improve the game anywhere they can. In other companies they do not work with them but are totally separate so that the game is tested without influence or hints from the designers. These are applicable for types of games that require guessing or logic to figure out how the game parts are to be completed. These types of game require a tester that has to figure out how they could run in the game and also to determine how difficult the game is for them to get the right way around during each stage in the game.