Game Automation Testing — As a career
Many of us have given up gaming just because people used to tell us that its completely waste of time. At some point of time, if playing video games has been passion of your life, now you can change into a career. Yes, don’t be surprised.
Let me ask you a simple question:
How would you feel, if you get an opportunity to work on something that you would have always loved to do?
It sounds amazing isn’t it. Let us go through some of the facts and figures to deep dive into the gaming industry.
In 2019, overall revenue of the Gaming industries was around 152 billion USD and is forecasted to reach around 230 billion by 2022. Due to COVID-19, Console gaming has definitely slowed down a bit however, at the same time mobile gaming has got a surge during this lock down time. Major part of these revenues are generated by countries like US and China, though we have consumer all across the globe.
Looking into the above points and stats, you might have received a clear insight that its worth investing time in learning these technologies. So I started exploring more about these industries and found few other interesting details. Companies are investing good amount of time and money in advancing their technologies. They are currently investing and advancing towards technologies like Extended Reality which is mix of AR , VR and MR i.e. Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality . These techs are latest enough and can be used in any industry but compared to other industries globally the gaming industry which is way ahead in these techs.
As the technologies are advancing way faster in the gaming industry, it definitely requires passionate people and more number of devices / infra required to test these games. So, interested people can definitely be a part of this industry and follow their passion. People who are fond of exploring latest techs can be a part of such industries as Developers and if you love to break things with your knowledge, you can join the industry as Test Developers.
In spite of all these advancements in this industry, I found there is too much of manual effort involved in testing these applications. So this industry has a potential requirement of Automation Test Developers and such tools. Knowledge of Testing Methodologies and Processes could be an added advantage to step into this industry.
How to start Automation of Game Testing :
To begin with, the first thing here is to understand, you can do two different type of testing here. One is White Box and other one is Black Box. I would recommend to go for white box first before performing the black box. Once you have the code base with you for any specific game you want to test, you will be able to access all the fixed set of images which that specific game requires for white box testing. You can classify those images in your model with different labels as per your need. For example, if there are two different type of objects in your game : Coins and Obstacles. The objective would be to collect the coins and avoid any obstacles in the game. Classify your objects as coin and obstacles and train one of your model to collect those coins and avoid the obstacles. You can also train other models for simulating different failures as well. So here what you need to do is use Computer Vision to identify the images / obstacles and act accordingly.
To achieve this you can use Python which possess enriched library base like OpenCV , Pillow (PIL) and NumPy for these kind of task and you can store these images as an object or as a multi dimensional matrix. Additionally, OpenCV provides the Object recognition and video processing capability from different directions. Now you need to test both the positive and negative cases. So you need to collect the coins and make sure your points are increasing accordingly. Simultaneously, you also need to check if on hitting any obstacles your player is being penalised accordingly. Further, you can train different models using any Machine Learning library to simulate different use cases. Only thing you need to make sure is, train your models for both kind of use cases , positive and negative. You also need to validate the point objects and lives /penalised point details as well. Once you have fed all these details into your code base, you can now run your tests and enjoy watching games.
For driving these test cases and to drive your reporting, you can take support of Pytest. For mobile game apps, you can integrate you code base with Appium to support different devices and platform. In the similar fashion, once your end to end White Box Testing is completed, you can go ahead with the Black box automation.
Let’s kick start our journey as game automation test developers and have some fun.
So you can start you game automation here and have fun simultaneously.
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