Chapter 72: A Proper Beta Test
Chapter 72: A Proper Beta Test
For starters, simply having a large testing sample was already a powerful advantage, and developers and gamers viewed games differently.
Gamers could play in unexpected ways the developers never intended, and through that, they could find bugs or problems the developers struggled to discover.
Moreover, in the end, the consumers of this game were not developers, but gamers. It meant they could test it in an environment closer to the official release.
Being able to raise the level of polish even higher while also checking gamers’ reactions in advance is a huge advantage.
Insu looked somewhat uneasily at Daniel’s back as Daniel busily posted on the boards, then soon turned his gaze back to his own computer.
Two weeks later, Daniel posted the tester recruitment notice.
[Testing is scheduled to begin three weeks from now. We will accept applications for the next two weeks, then hold a lottery and post the selected testers on this board.]
This lottery existed partly to limit the number of testers due to management and cost issues, but it was also meant to filter for people motivated enough to go through the process of writing an application, applying, and waiting.
Insu did not believe every tester would test with one hundred percent of the dedication he wanted. Still, he wanted to avoid, as much as possible, people receiving the beta version and then not touching it at all.
Insu had prepared rather carefully, and although the response so far had not been bad, he still worried slightly whether they would receive as many applicants as he wanted.
But that was needless worry.
“Team Lead. I think too many people are applying.”
It was about ten days after they started accepting applications. Daniel came to him with a troubled expression, and Insu learned that the number of applicants had already exceeded five hundred.
They had already passed ten times their target of fifty people. However, because they had already announced the application period, they could not close recruitment early. They accepted applications for the remaining four days, and in the end, 784 people applied.
“Dad. Mom. Please help.”
“Of course. Leave it to us.”
Hyein smiled and nodded.
Daniel was in charge, but he was not only managing QA. He was also a developer, so it was too much for him to handle the selection alone. Fortunately, Insu had the parent card to play.
In any case, both of them were members of Parallel Soft too. And depending on how one looked at it, they might choose even more diligently than Daniel.
[I’ve been a fan since TLF1! I played TLF all the way to the twentieth generation...]
[My dream is to become a game developer. Because of that, I also have a good eye for games.]
[I participated in the beta test for Eden 6 before.]
[I really want to try it!]
Even though the applications were only short messages like these, opening, reading, and judging hundreds of them one by one still required a considerable amount of time and effort.
If Daniel had tried to do this alone, he would have lost at least a day or two, and that would have affected the development schedule.
In the end, fifty-six people were selected. Originally, they planned to choose exactly fifty, but some of the application posts sounded more desperate than expected, making them difficult to cut.
Also, since unexpected variables could arise, such as a tester having circumstances that prevented participation or a delivery issue occurring, they simply added a few extra people instead of cutting it off exactly.
“First, let’s do a simple internal test.”
A while later, the beta version was complete, but they did not send it out immediately. First, they had to fix anything that made the game unplayable or any bugs that stood out clearly.
This was not an era when they could upload patches over the internet, so they had no choice but to get it right before sending it.
After one week of internal testing and debugging, the external beta test version was complete.
(Translator’s Note: External Beta Test — Testing stage in which ordinary players outside the development team test a pre-release version and report bugs or gameplay problems.)
Every team member joined in and worked hard to copy it. Since this was not an official release, but a test version, using an industrial diskette duplicator was inconvenient due to both cost and the difficulty of matching the vendor’s schedule. It was troublesome, but unavoidable.
Thanks to that, the development room was filled for a while with the repeated sounds of “drrrk, drrrk” and “click.”
And shipping them became Seongcheol and Hyein’s task once again.
Seeing the two of them sweating as they prepared the shipments made Insu feel apologetic, and he wondered whether he should have just called the testers to the development room and told them to pick the copies up themselves.
But calling them to the development room still isn’t right, is it?
It could make the developers uncomfortable and affect development, and there were also security issues. Of course, Parallel Soft was no longer exactly hiding itself, but that was a different matter from having gamers or fans constantly coming in and out.
If they came out of fan enthusiasm, he would be grateful for their feelings, but separately from that, realistically, it would inevitably become a disruption.
In any case, the beta test began like this.
A few days later, in an apartment in New York, Jeremy Brooks was returning from university classes. As he passed the entrance as usual, he stopped as though remembering something and opened his mailbox.
“Is it here?!”
There was a fairly large box inside. When he took it out, just as he hoped, Parallel Soft’s name was written on it.
[By Parallel Soft]
The beta version of TLF2 he had been waiting for had arrived. As a fan of the previous game, when he heard they were recruiting testers, he sent in an application filled with his heartfelt fan enthusiasm, and a while later, he found his ID on the list of selected testers.
“It must be diskettes, right?”
Perhaps they had stuffed it full of cushioning material, because the box was bulky and made no sound, so he felt slightly suspicious. Still, he carried it and hurried to his room.
When he tore open the package, two plastic cases came out along with several sheets of paper. Each case contained five diskettes.
It has a large capacity again.
The papers thanked him for participating in the test and warned him never to leak this test version. Since he had already seen the same content in the recruitment post, even the passage about possible legal responsibility no longer felt as chilling as it had the first time.
“Yes, yes, I understand.”
Since he had no intention of doing that anyway, even out of sheer laziness, he skimmed it, tossed it aside, and immediately took out the diskettes.
[TLF2 BETA #1]
Unlike an official package, the diskettes only had very brief information written on them. Fortunately, the diskette order was properly marked, so there was no problem installing it.
“Oooh!”
When he launched the game, after a brief loading period, the title screen appeared. It had the same name as the first game he had spent countless hours on, but with a “2” attached to the end, and the design felt distinctly different.
Maybe it’s better?
And at the end, the word “BETA” was also written there.
Once he entered the game, it was similar to the previous entry, but he immediately felt that the graphics and sound had been upgraded. In truth, the colors and resolution were the same, but the quality of the art had improved, and the game used a wider variety of images, creating that impression.
The early section was mostly similar to the previous game, but there were changes and additions in small details such as items and skills, making it feel familiar while also giving it a different flavor.
Seems pretty good?
But even though it was a test version, the level of completion was higher than he expected. He had heard somewhere before that the test version of some game had so many bugs it was hard to play and became irritating, so he felt a little tense, but this was simply comfortable.
“Huh?”
However, not long after that thought, he became clearly aware of a “bug” for the first time.
He discovered a phenomenon where damage intermittently did not register at all.
He had seen on the forums that TLF1 also definitely had quite a few bugs, but none of them seriously interfered with play. He was not sensitive to such things either, so even after playing for so long, he never noticed them. But this was too obvious to miss.
Record it first.
He was not particularly irritated. After all, he had started knowing there would be many bugs. Rather, it felt like he was properly testing, and like he was contributing to the creation of the sequel to a game he loved, so he even felt a little excited.
After that, the fifty-six testers across America, including Jeremy, diligently played the game and sent reasonably sincere bug reports through PC communication.
Of course, Parallel Soft was also internally playing and testing the beta version.
“These are the bugs that came in today.”
Daniel diligently organized the testers’ reports and handed them to Insu, and Insu classified them again before distributing them to the team members.
“This one’s already been found, and... something like this exists?”
While checking the bugs assigned to him, Yoonsu was startled when he heard there was an instant-death bug. System-wise, it might not be very fatal, but if players were all lured into using this bug, it could drastically reduce the game’s fun, making it a dangerous bug after all.
Where did this come from?
First, he began by reproducing it. The only relief was that the conditions were fairly tricky and it did not activate one hundred percent of the time. Even more fortunately, it had been found in the test version before the official release.
He executed the conditions sent by the tester one by one and analyzed the logs. As expected, not all of them were necessary conditions. Since the testers were not professional QA staff or developers, their analysis could not be precise.
What Yoonsu discovered was that after throwing away herbs, monster by-products, and several kinds of ore, transferring them to another character, or selling them—in other words, removing them from that character’s inventory—if the player waited and then used a spell called Ice Spear, it dealt far stronger damage than its original power.
Ah. It’s that one.
Seeing the conditions, Yoonsu quickly guessed what had gone wrong.
As expected.
When he went to the place he suspected, the code was indeed tangled. In other words, it was a bug derived from the Great Magic system.
Unlike ordinary magic, Great Magic required materials to be paid as a cost before activation. Most Great Magic spells were coded so that all other conditions also had to match, but one attack spell called Flames of Hell had an incorrectly set value among its other conditions. As a result, it activated as long as some of the materials, casting time, and any spell execution were present.
In reality, it was not an instant-death spell. It was merely a spell so powerful that, by early-game standards, there was almost nothing it could not kill.
Yoonsu corrected it and reproduced the situation again.
“That did it.”
Of course, just in case, he did not forget to check whether similar bugs existed.
Like the other team members, Insu clutched his head as he searched for bugs. Somehow, even after introducing external testing, it felt like the workload had increased instead.
It was definitely effective to find bugs from a different perspective. There were more than one or two bugs that made him wonder how anyone had even found them.
But since the testers were not experts, the reports were too crude and inaccurate. Just identifying the exact conditions and reproducing them took forever.
But it’s true that the effect is definite.
Lately, while looking at the flood of bug reports pouring in through the boards, Insu thought it was truly lucky that his previous works, TLF and MFN, had not suffered from major bug issues.
That had probably been possible partly because of luck, but also because the code had a high degree of consistency thanks to being made by a small number of people, and because the systems were simpler compared to TLF2, which was currently in development.
From now on, no matter how difficult it was, he felt they could not skip external beta testing.
For now, the test ran for three weeks. However, that was only the period in which external testers received the game, played it, and submitted reports.
After that, they still had to spend nearly two more months debugging.
In the meantime, the year changed, 1993 arrived, and March came.