2 Questions

1.How can i become a game tester for big companies or just ones that have adverts on tv and people talking about them

2. How can i work for the same type of companies as above?(my guess is make a few good indie games show them it and then see if i can?) Remember im only 14

 

1. If you want to live the life of a game tester, move to North Korea and badmouth Dear Leader.
2. Education, a portfolio, and experience. Also, any company likes a can-do attitude more than excuses like, "If I had Unity Pro, I could make a little game!"

 

1. There are some companies recuiting, search for quality assurance jobs, another way to say "tests"

2. XP, portfolio, network, and *LUCK* according to me

 

there are companies in the usa

 

LOL, yes, there are companies in the US. I was trying to point out that the life of a game tester is not terribly fun. No matter how much your dress it up, testing is terribly draining and repetitive work.

 

Yep, game testing doesn't mean "be paid for playing the game til the end", it's full part of quality assurance, ie reliability, user experience, difficulty balancing, and a lot of feedback for game designer and developpers ;p

 

I am just wondering what do you mean by portfolio? How would portfolio for game tester look like? I am not interested in postion, i am just curious .

 

I think the portfolios were in regards to other jobs. If I had to make a portfolio for game testing, it would be a picture of how much Mountain Dew I could drink and maybe a video of me playing the same level for the 400th time.

 

Hehe

 

I remember way back in the day testing the German version of Mercedes Benz Truck Racing.

Big rig trucks.
Slowly driving in a circle.
8 hrs a day.
Every day.
OMG

 

Sorry but from what I've seen you can't be one until you're 18. It's a legal thing. I've looked and tried to become a tester since I'm currently 16, but due to it being full-time it's illegal for anyone under 18 to work full-time in the US. Even my picture of all of my probably 100 games over the past 3 years didn't help. Because of this I'm now creating my own games, and soon opening my own website for game reviews, etc.

 

If you live near a fairly large publisher, it's not that hard to be a tester. They end up throwing a lot of people at the job and see who sticks.

Some places will have you take a test. The test mainly measures your ability to spot problems. Things that are 'wrong' or 'don't fit'.

If you're not near a large publisher, and want to grab a testing job at a developer near you, it's a little tougher since there are fewer positions. And the people they have may be a little more entrenched.

But a good idea is to look at some current games and play through them, noting bugs you find and recording the steps you would take to reproduce the bug. So that a 3rd party could read what you wrote, follow your instructions, and reproduce the bugs themselves.

 

Game tester is my definition of hell, but you can find reams of information about it if you type game tester into google.

There used to be a sony office near where I live and you could just walk in and apply for a job but it's soul destroying and thankless work and they wont hesitate to fire your ass if you don't toe the line as there's chumps lining up to do your job for low pay. There's a reason why there's a high worker turnover rate.

 

Well quality assurance has a huge range of positions as well. There are the $8-15 an hour temp-testers, but there are also full time QA engineer and analyst positions that pay just as well as the C++ engineer positions at the same time.

 

QA is Fun! The documents you have to fill in while you test show how tedious it is.

Imagine testing a level to see if collision is in place, so you can't fall out of the world - 8 hours a day.
Now imagine that game is "Barbie meets Ken: Epic Adventures". lol

It's a foot in the door though, so if you have any other skills like art/coding, it's possible to transfer to the dev team.

I don't know about age, had lots of teenagers as work experience or during holidays/summer vacation as part of the QA team (in UK)

 

Yeah, a lot of people think being a video game tester means you get to play the latest and greatest titles before anyone else gets to. They forget that for each of the really awesome games out there, there are a thousand that suck and they all are tested by some poor schmuck who thinks they are getting a foot in the door of real game development. Don't know how much has changed since I stopped dreaming of working in the game industry, but I turned down several jobs with publishers simply because they paid half of what I was currently earning and had lousy benefits all because there are hundreds of people all lined up to take that job anyway because they think it will be fun. But truthfully you'll make more money working for Starbucks than as an entry level game tester. Or at least that used to be the case.

Get a degree kid. Even if it has nothing to do with what you think you want to do. It will go miles to getting a real job working in the game industry. The reason I had the pleasure of turning down FASA Interactive (when they existed) and a few other places was I had an advanced degree that many of the others did not have.

 

I did Rugrats in Paris. Is that close enough?

 

Hi,

Thanks very much for this comment. It help me to think about my ideals.

Tks again and pls keep posting.

If you want to get more materials that related to this topic, you can visit: Game tester resume

Best regards.

 

Hello?