Industry Practice - Alpha & Beta Testing Phase of our Game

Alpha & Beta Testing Phase of our Game

What is Alpha Testing and its importance

Alpha testing is testing done on a game that is used to identify and underlining bugs that are in this alpha build of the game before releasing the final asset into the public eye and for people to play on publicly. It gained its title of being Alpha testing due to this type of testing being primarily done during the starting phase of the games development before finalising details such as how the game assets in these builds are commonly not finished such as small background items missing or spelling mistakes or even small clipping bugs but nothing that can cause the game to be unplayable.

Alpha testing is considered important towards the games industry as it is able to alarm the developers of an upcoming title of any issues or bugs that may be harder to identify over a single glance at the game. In addition , alpha testing allows different ideas to branch out from the original test with different amount of feedback as having things that aren't polished or finalised are going to constantly going through the cycle of constant change in design.

Once the alpha testing phase is over and finished considering all the different new feedback and altering any issues with bugs from the alpha build, the build will move onto the next stage of working on a beta release of the game which is the last steps before a finalised game to the public.

Gaming Testing Site

Alpha Testing our Game

To alpha test our game , we uploaded an alpha version onto our itch.io page with this game missing certain assets and scenes in a few different areas. In this alpha build we ended up not checking through all the individual pieces of grammar and spelling which was meaning that there was going to be mistakes in this build.

We were able to find 2 people who were able to alpha test our game for us which was then able to bring up plenty of different issues from this build due to different sprites appearing when they aren't supposed to be talking or sprites entirely missing which was helpful to our progress as all we had to do was go back through the code and fix these smaller issues.

When it came down to fixing the spelling mistakes, the alpha tester screenshotted all of the errors and sent them over to jess which was sent back to our working channel which saved us a lot more time than having us individually going through the game ourselves and fixing the spelling in a slower fashion.

Overall , alpha testing our game gives us a huge benefit when it came down to the feedback we received and how quickly we managed with our feedback and made sure that fixed the issues directly as they happened.

Beta Testing

Beta Testing is the testing phase that is closer towards the final product containing a more polished game. Beta testing is where u send out to a group of the audience that u are aiming to be working towards and allow them to try your game and send back development feedback whilst even though this game is near the final stages does not mean it can still end up having flaws in the end as there may be changes that can be fixed during the last weeks during the time frame u are given to work on a project.

Conducting beta testing allows the game to finalise the lasting issues before releasing the game to the public as when the game releases it is better to have the game running with minimal bugs going through multiple testing phases than a game that has not had any testing and is just filled with bugs and game breaking glitches ruining the experience.

How would we Beta Test our game

As we were finishing the details on our game, Jess sent our game into a separate discord server with our friends who have not been notified of the game or what prompt we have went with to play our game and once they finished their run to fill out a feedback form created by our director Katie.

Our Feedback Form

Katie was the one who created this feedback form to attach to our itch.io page for us to be able to gain feedback from our peers playing through as a game. As a group we spent time discussing on what style of questions we want on this form and ended up with a decent small selection of questions for people to answer such as did we represent anxiety and depression respectfully through our game or do u think that the game is actually suitable for the audience we set of 14.

Link to our form : https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeHX7inPxhE4UMfNQJ0woFALr3Lj8DMcfwedAQZN96d25G9Tw/viewform?pli=1

Different Feedback forms we received

Here are a selection of different feedback forms made. Whilst most people praised the games production , there was still issues inside of the game we had to quickly alter thanks to us going back and changing these issues following the forms.

References

Anon , Game Tester [online]. Gametester.gg . Available at: https://gametester.gg/developer [Accessed 13 May 2025]

Rahul . A, Tech Target [online] . What is a beta test?. Available at :https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/beta-test [Accessed 13 May 2025]