Candy Critters: Idle Merge
I worked as:
Project QA Lead
An Idle Merge Mobile game focused around creatures called Chomplets who clear towns filled with candy based obstacles.
“Welcome to Candy Critters! Are you ready to lead a team of adorable Chomplets on a delightful journey through Sweetopia? Recruit and merge cute critters to help clear candy debris, uncover hidden coins, and reveal long lost treasures as you progress further into the sugary world of Sweetopia!”
My Major Contributions
One of the major Candy Critter Updates I performed QA for, was the Battlepass Update. This update was heavily interconnected with other pre-existing systems, and required heavy halo testing with each interconnected system. The Battlepass consisted of a new item claim system, a set of new IAPs and a special new ‘Red Fizz Bomb‘ upgrade.
One major bug I encountered during development was to do with item claiming. As intended by the design spec, items when claimed were required to be applied to the Main Campaign, however in practice, if they were claimed inside an event, they would apply to the event instead. This would often create Null Reference errors when claimed in the wrong location as well as a set of other cascading bugs to do with the chest drop probability tables. Ultimately I worked closely with Engineering while I smoke tested the Battlepass inside events to identify and eliminate these issues before release.
Battlepass Update
Candy Critters makes use of a set schedule of events that determined when an IAP offer would be sent to the players or, when special Limited Time Events would run.
The special ‘Sweet Treats‘ IAP events were where I encountered one of the most complex bugs I had to solve. The event was intended to give a different set of IAPs and rewards depending on a cohort that was assigned to each player based on their spending rates. However, the bug I encountered was that if a player changed cohorts mid event, the whole event would reset. Since the game had over 30 cohorts, a player could be assigned to, I decided to create a test case suite to mark off each cohort as I changed between them.
Limited Time Events made up a majority of my workload in each update, as each event would require a complete art reskin, a new level layout, and a different set of cards/critters. This lead to heavy smoke tests during development and an in depth release test to ensure everything worked as intended.
Another responsibility of mine, was to monitor player reviews and support tickets. This had me observe player crash rates through the Firebase Console, record certain player reviews and provide gifts to players affected by bugs.
Live Ops & Limited Time Events
Meta Critters & Cards
The Meta Critter system is one of the more complex aspects of the game, as each ‘Meta Critter‘ acted as a unique special character who would appear during gameplay to provide unique effects.
Each Unique Meta Critter required a unique set of checks on due to their unique abilities that would require a different set of QA checks whenever a new Critter was implemented.
One such implementation that was particularly difficult was for the ‘Pookie‘ critter. This Critter had an ability that would give the player a set amount of gold when merging their critters. The bug we identified was a display issue where the incorrect income amount would be shown compared to what the player actually gained. Due to my knowledge on the project, I was able to quickly identify that this was caused by the ‘Card‘ system. Cards were an old system that contained a set of upgradeable affects that improve player gold production, many cards had different affects, meaning I had to carefully identify and test each card that would change the value in order to provide a list in my bug report for Engineering to fix.