Towards Automated Playtesting in Game Development
Resumo
Digital games are also a software product. However, games have a fun requirement and tightly coupled UI, which makes them hard to test. Nevertheless, they are made of code and might also benefit from the advantages that automated tests bring to enterprise software systems. In this paper, we discuss two categories of automated tests for games, focusing on playtesting. We used the Unity Game Engine to build our tests on top of the NUnit framework and the Unity Test Framework. To demonstrate our approach for automated playtesting, we developed a 2D Arkanoid-style game. We also present the steps we took to make the testing feasible.
Referências
E. Murphy-Hill, T. Zimmermann, and N. 2014. "Cowboys, ankle sprains, and keepers of quality: how is video game development different from software development?" In Proc. of the 36th ICSE, 2014, pp 1–11. doi: https://doi.org/10.1145/2568225.2568226
S. Aleem, L. F. Capretz, and F. Ahmed, “Critical success factors to improve the game development process from a developer’s perspective,” Journal of Computer Science and Technology, 2018, pp 925-950.
G. Lovreto, A. T. Endo, P. Nardi, and V. H. S. Durelli, “Automated tests for mobile games: An experience report,” in Proc. 17th Brazilian Symp. on Comp. Games and Dig. Ent. (SBGames), 2018, pp 399-407.
J. N. de Oliveira Neto, D. Viana, E. S á, L. Rivero, R. F. Lopes, and F. Silva, “Is there time for software testing in the indie games development? a survey with practitioners of the game industry,” in Proceedings of the XXXIII SBES, 2019,
Y. Zhenget al., “Wuji: Automatic online combat game testing using evolutionary deep reinforcement learning,” in Proc. 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), 2019, pp.772–784.
D. Spadini, M. Aniche, M. A. Storey, M. Bruntink, and A. Bacchelli, “When testing meets code review: Why and how developers review tests,” in Proc. of International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2018, pp. 677-687
M. Mayeda and A. Andrews, “Evaluating software testing techniques: A systematic mapping study,” in Advances in Computers, A. R. Hurson, Ed. 2021, vol. 123, ch. 2, pp. 41–141
Z. Peng, X. Lin, M. Simon, and N. Niu, “Unit and regression tests of scientific software: A study on swmm”, Journal of Computational Science, 2021, vol. 53, pp. 1–13
M. F. Aniche and M. A. Gerosa, “How the practice of tdd influences class design in object-oriented systems: Patterns of unit tests feedback”, in Proc. of the 26th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering, 2012, pp.1–10
N. Llopis and S. Houghton. (Mar. 2006). Backwards is forward: Making better games with test-driven development. Presented at the Game Developers Conference. San Francisco, USA. [Online]. Available: http://www.convexhull.com/articles/tddgdc06.pdf
Z. Song, “An automated framework for gaming platform to test multiple games,” in Proc. of IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion), 2020, pp.134–136.
E. Gamma, R. Helm, R. Johnson, and J. Vlissides, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., 1995.