Mobile Catalogue Updates
Mobile QA Lead Experience
Most of my experience in QA at Playside was working as the Lead for our Mobile titles. During this time, I developed skills in planning and communication, working directly with my producer to gain a strong understanding of the projects status, working with Artists and Engineers to confirm the projects requirements and teaching other QA our planned workflows.
One of the biggest projects I undertook in my time as Project Lead was the pre-production for a currently unannounced project. This project saw me enter meetings with other leads and major stakeholders to develop early test plans, draft test cases and develop workflows such as Bug Triages. An edited version of the test plan that removes all redacted info can be viewed below:
Dumb Ways to Die 1 & 2
When updating Dumb Ways To Die 1 & 2, we were aiming to release both games onto the Epic Game Store Platform, creating a test of my abilities when it came to certification testing.
As both titles were the first projects we would put into the Epic Game Store, I had to study the cert requirements Epic had layed out in their documentation while navigating development in an unfamiliar landscape. This would lead to issues in testing IAPs especially, as we were required to have the player log into their Epic account before they could purchase an IAP, I needed to ensure all store links spread throughout each game could only be accessed after logging in. Given the large number of HUD links and push popups in DW2, this was especially difficult. Eventually I was able to solve this issue via focus tests on the UI and all store links.
Garbage Truck 3D
‘Garbage Truck 3D‘ was one of our most profitable mobile titles, and saw multiple updates during my time. This project underwent multiple design specs and had lots of small changes in its updates, making it a strong test of my ability to verify update requirements.
One troublesome change I had to test for, was a complete UI overhaul of the upgrade screen and FTUE. Design & UI had worked together to improve the readability of the upgrade screen, however due to this overhaul, many new bugs were created due to the changes. The FTUE changes created many such bugs I had to thoroughly test, as the player was able to skip or completly miss the new FTUE in some cases, requiring me to create tickets for Design and Engineering to build edge case fixes for.
Another major project I worked on an update for was ‘Animal Warfare‘. For this game, we initially set out to complete a basic SDK update however, we were instead met with a major bug that only affected iOS platforms.
The bug was an issue with IAPs, while a newly installed version of the game was able to purchase IAPs as intended, a player who updated from an older version would be unable to complete any purchases. This was an issue we identified through our Firebase analytics close to release, thankfully due to our ability to find the issue from our analytics, we solved it before it went live.
Animal Warfare
Dumb Ways to Draw 1
Dumb Ways to Draw stands out as a major update for me, as I was simultaneously working on both a general Update to hit mobile stores and a special release to go into the Epic Game Store.
The Epic Game Store version required the removal of all ads, meaning I needed to create a clear distinction between normal versions and the Epic version during testing and the creation of bug reports. To tackle this issue, I created two ‘mini-Test Plan‘ documents that were used as a set of guidelines on how to separate the projects during bug tests, as well as a workflow on ensuring the correct build is tested, and that bug reports were clearly separated by project type in Jira.
Other Mobile Projects
In addition to the updates completed in the other projects listed here, I also completed minor SDK updates that involved extensive Destructive & General Tests for the following projects:
Dumb ways 3
Dumb ways 4
Battlesim
Toy Warfare
Fishy Bits 2
Dumb Draw 2