Company: Supermassive Games / Sony Interactive Entertainment
Hidden Agenda was a crime thriller and one of Sony’s PlayLink games, where you play using your iOS or Android phone instead of a controller. Up to six people vote on decisions, and those votes shape the story. I was on the core QA team for it while also testing two other games.
What I did
- Learned to test with phones as controllers, which came with its own set of problems to look out for.
- Tested the co-op Story Mode and the competitive mode, where some players are secretly given their own objectives.
- Mapped out the branching story and tested the different paths, character combinations and scene changes that come from players’ choices.
- Wrote bug reports in DevTrack, a lot of them about multiplayer connections and the phone app.
- Tested the E3 demo, the game’s first showing to press and the public.
The number of combinations was the hard part. Every scene could play out differently depending on earlier choices and who was still alive, across two modes and up to six players. Knowing the story paths well meant I could reach the unusual situations where the harder to find bugs were.
The E3 demo bug
While testing the E3 demo, we had a bug where a character would disappear from every scene for good if the game was restarted on the same save. It was stubborn and nobody could pin it down. I kept digging until I worked out it was down to corrupted save data, and suggested a simple workaround: clear the save data between playthroughs. That let the developers sort it before the demo went in front of the press, and the dev team thanked me for getting to the bottom of it.
Tools
DevTrack, Confluence, Unreal Engine 4, iOS and Android devices and Supermassive’s own debug tools.