Mobile Game Testing – An Introduction

Testing a mobile game is no easy task. From an extremely general viewpoint, testing a mobile game is simply ensuring that the game downloads, installs and is played properly. The user experience should be seamless and all target requirements should be met.

It’s easy to say and seems pretty easy right? It poses to be an extremely task especially in cases where the game developers launch the game globally across multiple devices.

A major chunk of revenues for Google and Apple via their respective app stores is through mobile games. With this stat is

mind, it critical to ensure that the games are tested seamlessly.

Challenges in Testing Mobile Games

The market pertaining to mobile games is a total red ocean, meaning it is fiercely contested.

The users as well have a very short attention span. Maintaining a relationship with the user and adding content regularly are key factors that influence the customer lifetime value.

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This translates to the game functioning over a few app updates, backend updates and many other factors.

What are the challenges to test the aspects of mobile games?

Many of the games today use direct screen access. They do this by bypassing OS level services using ActiveX or OpenGL.

Due to this all native mobile test automation frameworks become redundant when it comes to mobile games. The automation only utilizes XY clicks as there is no access to object level information.

Performance is always key for a mobile game to be successful. Enhanced user experience and actual gameplay performance can be monitored only when real hardware is used.

Today, there are millions of different models of mobile phones. Bearing this in mind frame rates matter a lot and enhance the gameplay. Some games may be graphic intense and will consume lot of memory.

While testing for performance, the memory a game consumes, the level of battery it consumes, the RAM that is required for optimum performance must also be taken into account.

This will ensure that the final build is user friendly and functions seamlessly across all mobile devices.

A few games make use of sensors or other features on the phone. These features may not be uniform across all devices. This definitely needs to be checked pre-release.

Testing a mobile game includes a wide range of methods, tools and frameworks. However, most game developers have a habit of doing things like rule of thumb. More than 90% of the developers make use of some sort of image recognition analysis.

Testing becomes easy because it can be a task like capturing a screenshot and doing the analysis manually or automatically.

OR

A game can be test scripts driven with a wholly automated gameplay. This way, the output is logged for further review.

OR

Ideally, combining the above two techniques would be perfect. This would make use of real time graphics and compare it to pre-set graphic sets. Following this the game would be played via the test script.

We will discuss more about mobile game testing techniques in our upcoming blogs. Stay Tuned for updates.

HAPPY GAME TESTING!!!

In case you’re interested to try out this for your game, please contact us and we’ll be happy to share some great use cases and show you how it can be done for your game.