Quality and Criticism

A view from test. In testing and game testing especially its important that everybody involved with LSHD should have some idea of what it is and where it came from. Since LSHD the natural evolution of the original Little Soldiers then in this case the simple answer is everyone spends time to play little soldiers, the first one. On the surface it almost seems like a waste of time to spend a few hours goofing off playing a video game that is antiquated and years outside of development, however I've noticed a trait that developers and testers alike all seem to share. When they use an application or play a game they almost always have that little voice in their head saying "thats dumb.. it should do this" or "ooohh, thats cool! what if it did this too!?".. Do it often enough and you can't even shut it off anymore. Your mom makes you a nice steak and you immediately blurt out "ooo, if you'd taken this off the BBQ 5 minutes ago it would have been perfect!" In testing, I have a tendency to play with the first "cool" thing I find. I know my mind will hyper focus on it whether I want it to or not so I tend to try and focus that attention (misguided as it sometimes is) on that element until I can complain / criticize it. Yesterday I was looking at a particle effect thinking "this is soooo F--- cool!!", I ended up playing with it and staring at it (zooming in and zooming out and swirling around, etc) until I got to the point where I stopped liking it. I found a bug or an inconsistency that nags at me. Now I can prioritize a bug and push back to the guy that wrote the particle effects. [caption id="attachment_124" align="aligncenter" width="322" caption="Particles"] [/caption] Thats not to say that I don't put down a list of all the elements that need testing and drudge through it but when I get the itch to play with something I don't fight it, I embrace it. Its like in Call of Duty where you play the same level 400 times and in the end you stealthily sneak up to each enemy on the level (because you know where every single one stands and the pathing they go through) so you can knife them all.. that level of obsession works great in game testing because there are simply too many possible permutations to test to not be obsessive.