Company: Team17 (Publisher) / Pathea Games (Developer)
My Time at Portia is a 3D sandbox life sim where you build, craft and farm. Team17 published it on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, and I was on the QA team there, mostly focused on compliance and making sure the game held together.
A lot was new to me on this one: my first Unity game, a new bug tracker (Redmine) and a genre I hadn’t tested before. I had to get up to speed quickly.
What I did
- Compliance testing for all three console platform holders, building on what I’d already learned about Sony’s requirements. I became one of the team’s go to people for it.
- Built Excel test sheets covering every in-game item and collectible, so we could track what had been tested and what was broken.
- Helped write playthrough guides in Confluence so the main story events and the golden path got tested consistently.
- A lot of exploratory testing of the crafting and progression systems.
The soft lock
While digging into the game’s mechanics, I found a nasty soft lock caused by losing certain key items, which could stop players progressing. It had been missed until then, and my colleagues gave me a lot of credit for catching it before release.
Tools
Redmine, Excel, Confluence, the Unity engine, and PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Switch dev kits.