The course can be short and just have a very basic game, with the focus being on testing. Whether it’s test-driven development or not. Unity has support for unit testing, and play testing is well known. No existing courses seem to cover this. Rather than being a standalone course, it could be included in existing courses as an optional module.
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Just adding my support on this. While it’s not the sexiest part of the process, game testing for indie developers often seems to consist of firing up the game and trying to break things, or maybe a list of prior issues to fire up the game and try to test. Instead, the developer should be writing up unit tests to test their logic, and should have semi-automated to automated setups to do things like spawn specific enemies, set event flags, and run through multiple scenarios to catch a prior bug sneaking back in.
To borrow an example from The Trenches (sadly, it looks like the webcomic isn’t online anymore), you shouldn’t be opening every single door in Portallis to verify that they can open, but instead should be writing a script to iterate over them.
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To expand on my first post:
It’s really focussing on good practices for game development with Unity. These could be incorporated into existing courses, or as it’s own course.
This list is just to get a load of ideas/points down. It’s not really exhaustive or expected that it’s all included.
- Does adding this new feature break everything else?
- Can testing be automated rather than constant play testing by the developer
- How this saves time, but is also good practice
- Lessons from industry ways
- Bug reporting from users
- The Unity Test Framework package
- Reliability and maintainability
- Development life cycles
- Unit testing
- Test driven development
- Other testing approaches like performance, integration, regression, A/B, etc.
- How to diagnose and find bugs, stepping through code, debugging methods
- How we can borrow from all this as an indie dev.
There is a lot of room for expansion too, if at this point it could branch out to all good practices rather than just testing and quality assurance (QA). Like code architecture, project structuring, version control, deployment, etc. But I appreciate this is a big ask.
From a point of view as this course not being a big seller, I think GameDev.tv could find themselves offering a course which isn’t out there in the wild and could plug a gap in the market.