Work from Home Game Testing Jobs ?

Sup...Ok so I'm really interested in a job as a game tester while I'm in school for game design. Only thing is I live in Oklahoma and most game companies are on the coast, in bigger cities, or overseas and I cannot afford to relocate unless it's paid for. So my question is, are there actually companies that offer "work from home" positions ? If so, can you point me to the companies and a possible link to the application process ?

Also, I'm new to "game testing" but not "game playing", so if anyone wants to break down the basics of how it works that would be great. I own a Xbox One if that makes a difference...Thanks in advance guys !

 

The job position you are looking for is Quality Assurance (QA). There a few different roles within it as well. Typically it’s not often a work from home type job largely because of hardware and network requirements. And even in the rare cases there are, they are almost none at entry level. Additionally there is a lot more involved to than simply playing games.

 

Game playing: "I went and threw a grenade at the wall and it exploded and it was awesome!"

Game testing: "I threw a grenade at the wall. It exploded. I threw a grenade at a rock. It exploded. I threw a grenade straight up. It did not explode - Bug report 3725. I threw a grenade while running, it exploded. I threw a grenade then saved and exited the game before it could explode. I reloaded the game. The grenade did not explode - Bug report 3726."

You get the idea. Game testers get to play every single level thousands of times over looking for weird edge cases and bugs. Then they have to duplicate them in a way that can be understood by the programmers.

 

Pretty much. But even so, there is often very little open ended, playing and looking for bugs. The usual process is that a test case / plan is written and they go in and test those specific requirements. For instance when a new feature is added to build, they will have a huge list of what it supposed to do, and what the expected results are from a variety of actions. You usually aren’t “playing the game”, more hammering away at very narrow parameters.

 

BE REALISTIC... never stop dreaming. X)

 

No matter how much we unit test, scenario test, regression test etc, there is always bugs that are found through playing the game. We always have alot of normal playing on our Steam Beta branch before we release a new update to production branch.

 

There's a good amount of talking to your QA lead and often to developers, which makes it a lot easier if you are in the same building. Also often there is a good amount of hardware compatibility testing to do, which makes working from home out of the question (unless you happen to have every video card NVidia and AMD has made in the last 5 years, or every phone made by Apple, HTC, Samsung, etc). The only way I could see QA at home working is if you hook up with an indie dev team that is already working remotely.

Here's the general process you as QA go through:

* Author and update test plans as the product develops, holes are identified in existing plans, or new changed modify functionality.
* Execute test plans and record results
* Investigate any issues found to attempt to isolate it down to a specific step that causes the bug, and file a detailed bug report. Often you're communicating with developers during this process.
* Verify fixes to any recently fixed bugs, while also investigating if the fix may have resulted in any new issues.
* Author test automation, monitor automation, investigate issues reported by automation and file bugs as appropriate, or just as often fix problems with your automation created by unexpected changes the devs made to the product.
* When a new build is available, rinse/repeat the whole process.

There's really very little actual playing the game going on during this process. For example, if you're assigned to test a character clothing feature, and there are 5 hats, 10 shirts, 10 pants, 5 shoes, 5 sunglasses, and 3 backpacks, that is 37,500 possible clothing combinations. You're not going to do them all manually, but the test plan may have you manually recreate 1,000 of them and record any anomalies and any drops in FPS. In a 40 hour week it should be doable to get 25 combinations done and results recorded per hour. After that you're assigned to create test automation for the other 36,500, after which that automation will run on every new build.

It will be your responsibility to monitor the automation and fix it if your automation breaks when the developers make a subtle change to the clothing feature without telling you in a future build. That's a pain because when that happens you're probably in the middle manually testing something else, like manually walking into every wall and every corner in every level looking for any problem collider that lets you unexpectedly walk through a wall, with barely enough time available to complete that task, because after that you need to walk through every UI window in every scene and test every text field and every button and it all needs to be done in 2/3 the amount of time you think it will take because your more experienced lead was able to do it that fast last time.

It is not all bad though. It actually can be a lot of fun. I just don't want you getting yourself confused, thinking testing games means playing games. If you're lucky, towards the end of the project you'll just have some multiplayer crash bugs open that the devs don't have enough information on, so they need you to actually all play the game together and send them any logs when you hit those crashes. Now you actually get to play the thing