by Johan Sandstrom, style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;"> Lead Level
Designer for The Chronicles of Spellborn



Little introduction

Before I get into the details of combat testing, let me first explain
the setup we have here for our QA department. Each of the QA testers
has developed certain knowledge of the game over time, but no one is
assigned to anything specific. This keeps our job fun because you get
to handle different test cases but it also means that everybody has a
thing they are more informed about. We all attend team meetings so we
know what design changes have been made, if any new features have been
implemented and basically keep up to speed on what is happening to the
game. Based on that information we make sure we know what to look for
in the game, what to test and what to ignore for the time being. ("A
purple building in the game is a work in progress, not a bug"
–
Lead Level Design)

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style="font-style: italic;">A lot of the basics
of combat have been established, and the game is now in "fine tuning".

Combat testing

Of course this important feature of our game has to be thoroughly
tested in any way we can to make sure that it not only works but it is
also fun from a player perspective. This is why testing the combat
system is not only performed by QA itself, but also by the combat
designers and AI programmers themselves. A lot of systems have passed
the review since design pitched the first idea, and the current system
is still open for improvement and added functionality. However, the
fact that QA has reached combat testing phase 3 by now means that a lot
of basics have been established and most of what is being done is fine
tuning before we get to combat balancing (although balancing is done
all the time by combat system specialist El "Selachii" Drijver).



Phase 1: Basic skill
functionality

The first testing phase involved the basic testing of skill
functionality. Just to give you an idea, we have about 200 skills which
all have a design description stating what the effects are, which
visuals should accompany the skill and much more info. So this meant
that each skill had to be compared with their description and checked
for inconsistencies or, in the worst case, stuff that just did not
work. We put a part of the QA team on this assignment, divided the
classes and went to work. This phase took about 5 days to complete and
resulted in about 100 bugs (some of which were related, don't worry).
One thing I have to mention is that this test did not include any party
skills yet because our Devs were still working on the way grouping
works. So this means that at a later stage, we will have to pick up the
party skills some classes have and go through the motions again.

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style="font-style: italic;">Bodyslots are an
incredibly complex system for the QA team to test.

Phase 2: Bodyslots

Before we could tackle the bodyslots both coders and combat design had
to check if everything was in place for QA to be able to test the
bodyslot functionality. I am not going into the details of our bodyslot
system here (you can check out the journal for that here) but it is a
very complex system that differs for each class and subclass. First of
all we had to assemble a list of bodyslot items that we could cheat
into our inventory. Once we got that together, again some of us went to
work with their respective subclasses and tested bodyslots. Some nice
bugs we encountered were, for example, the following: using
skinshifting bodyslot could result in teleporting yourself under the
world, summoning a pet, as well as the use of thrown items for the
Trickster, would result in a server crash, etc.



Don't worry though; this is exactly the kind of information Devs like
us to give to them. Well, not really "like", but if this kind of
testing was not done, just imagine what the game would end up like. We
all try to put together a cool and fun game with Spellborn, and QA is a
necessity in the process of getting there. The combat tests have not
been concluded yet after these phases of course. Now that the bugs have
been filed, we have to follow them up and check if the fixes the Devs
apply are working and don't break anything else. For instance, of the
100 bugs that were filed during Phase One, 52 have been fixed already
and
QA has checked these fixes and approved them.



I'm going to wrap things up here to make sure this journal doesn't
become too boring and long, but I'll leave you with the information
that phase 3 has been concluded as well: combos. And I can tell you
right now, they are awesome!

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