QA testers are the true heroes of WarioWare: Get It Together!

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The premise of each WarioWare The game is more or less the same: in his ongoing quest to become immensely rich, Wario decides to start a video game studio.

However, the opening scenes of WarioWare: Get it together! – the first entry in the series on Nintendo Switch released on September 10 – adds a new twist to the family story. This time around, Wario and his friends are sucked into the game they just created and must fight their way out crushing the evil bugs and glitches that ruin their hard work – a five second “microgame” at a time.

So what better way to review the game than to get a real life QA tester to play it?

Our volunteer is a senior quality assurance tester who has worked in the Montreal video game industry for nearly 15 years in various studios. Quite unlike the greedy Wario, who is described in the game as a “treasure, money, and garlic” lover, our anonymous reviewer was quite generous with his time.

In fact, they are the complete opposite of our titular hero, Wario. So for the purpose of this story, I guess we’ll call them… Mario.

Question: You have worked as a video game QA evaluator for quite some time. What’s the # 1 misconception about your job?

Mario: Some people think that QA testers just play video games all day. But there is a big difference between playing and trying a game. Sometimes as part of your job, you are asked to participate in a playtest session, which is literally when you just play and see how it goes. But 95 percent of the time, what you’re really doing is testing.

The difference between playing and testing is that when you are testing, you have a very specific set of goals. You’re trying to break the game and find ways to interrupt the flow, rather than enjoying the game itself. It makes sure that all functions work as they should. When you come to a crossroads or a decision point in the game, you are not choosing the most interesting option; you’re thinking, “Okay, if there are five different paths to choose from, I’ll have to try all five.”

Sometimes you don’t even touch the game and the whole day is planning the test; actually write the instructions for the test cases you need to run. Or you may just be reading documentation or attending meetings. In any given week, you might only watch the game you’re working on for a total of five hours, or the entire 40 hours. It really depends!

Q: In WarioWare: Get it together!, you have five seconds to win minigames quickly using 18 different characters with unique abilities to choose from. How do you imagine the QA process was for a game like this?

Mario: Oh, I’m sure there were a lot of people involved. The tricky thing about games like this is that the minigames are very short and yet there is a lot you can do as a player in the five seconds they give you. I’m sure the testers must have had debugging tools in place to allow them, for example, to pause the timer and stay in a minigame for as long as they needed.

To test the level thoroughly in a game like this, you need cheats that allow you to play the same level over and over or extend the amount of time you have. Otherwise it would probably be a nightmare to try it out.

Q: Speaking of the huge roster of playable characters in the game, the in-game explanation is that they are all part of Wario’s video game studio. There is also a multiplayer mode where two players can work together as different characters to beat the minigames. How many people does it generally take to make a video game?

Mario: My experience with previous studies is that you normally have a team of between 40 and 50 people. But it really can vary. The smallest team I have ever been on was about 5-7 people. There was a QA evaluator, that is, me, plus a designer, an artist, a producer, and the client. Teams can be small enough to launch a simple iOS app, for example.

I’ve also worked for games that will be released on consoles and PCs, and those teams can have 1,000+ people or more, working in different studios, on different aspects of the game. In those cases, there may be 5-6 different studies all collaborating just to do the quality control tests.

Q: Each level in WarioWare involves deleting, essentially debugging, a section of the faulty game in the game. What is the weirdest mistake you’ve ever come across?

Mario: A recurring one that always makes me laugh is when you’re testing a game and the character is in a dynamic pose, like mid-jumping or falling, and you trigger a scene, but you stay in the pose. So instead of standing there in earnest, the character is lying on his back or waving his arms as the scene unfolds around him.

However, mistakes are not always bad. Sometimes you run into a bug and the bug ends up making the game more fun, so stick with it!

Let’s say you have a game where your character is supposed to have very realistic physics, but there is a bug in the game that makes them jump too high. After trying and testing the game with the designer and different team members, you may decide that while it’s technically a bug, since it’s not what we intended it to be in the game, it actually adds something great to how the game feels. At that point, the error becomes a feature.

Q: Did you notice that even the background music is purposely designed to be buggy and corrupted in certain parts of the game. As a QA tester, do you also need to test game audio?

Mario: Absolutely. You need to ensure that the sound effects fire and mute as they should, that the dialogue is not clipping, that the background music changes and repeats seamlessly from one section of the game to another.

Audio is probably the most overlooked part of testing. You’re so focused on the visual stuff that it’s often the last item you end up trying. But of course you should test the audio as you test everything else.

Q: The WarioWare The series is about playing games, as fast as you can, until you can’t keep up and have to start over. QA testing just as hectic, especially as release dates start to approach?

Mario: You have to be cautious, because if it is Monday and the game will be activated on Friday, the later you mark a mistake, the lower the chance that your team will be able to correct the error in time. Therefore, there is a bit of pressure to find and resolve bugs as soon as possible.

At the end of the day, I think a bug-free game doesn’t really exist. The more you work on debugging, the cleaner the game will be. But ultimately your job is less about releasing a perfect game and more about finding and fixing as many bugs as possible before your live users find them themselves, which you don’t want.

WarioWare: Get it together! It is available now on the Nintendo Switch and is currently selling for $ 64.99.

Image Credit: Nintendo


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