Strawhart

Quality Assurance

Strawhart was my first experience in the game dev industry. Working as QA, I was responsible for end to end testing, providing detailed replication steps, and clearly communicating with programmers, artists and designers. Through my feedback, I was able to spearhead the addition of supplemental features like an in-game timer and a level select. My work on Strawhart would later open new opportunities for me at Cypher Creations.

Project Tasks

Trailer

First Industry Experience

I was brought onto Cypher Creations in the months leading up to the release of their first game, Strawhart. Strawhart is a 3D action-puzzle game where the player has to navigate linear levels, solve puzzles and fight bosses to progress. As Quality Assurance (QA), I was tasked with end to end testing and intuitive replication steps for any bugs I may encounter.

Despite the small and close-knit nature of the Strawhart team, I conducted myself in a professional manner. Formal documentation and replication steps for all bugs, major or minor, were always uploaded to our Trello and any design questions were always respectfully addressed to the appropriate team member. Our team was small, but we used that to our advantage with constant communication.

Innovation Through QA

Strawhart’s completely linear nature combined with its vast amount of unique puzzle pieces heavily emphasized the importance of QA. Even seemingly minor bugs like a box respawning out of the player’s reach or an NPC forgetting to give you a new power could result in a complete softlock. Realizing this, I adapted my testing habits. Instead of doing a full playthrough and reporting what stood out, I’d identify areas that were high risk for debilitating bugs and test those from several different angles. In between my more concentrated tests, I’d still make sure to do full sweeps of the game for minor bugs I may have missed. Since the severity of the bugs I reported became far more varied, I worked with the team to add a color-coded urgency level to our QA pipeline. Being able to adjust quickly to the needs of a project was one of the most important lessons I learned working as QA on Strawhart.

My feedback didn’t strictly pertain to glitches and exploits; I had a couple of my own design ideas as well. While most of my design feedback amounted to some minor adjustments for the sake of clarity. some actually ended up becoming key features. Although puzzle games are typically trivialized once you memorize the solution to all the puzzles, I noticed that I was still having fun on multiple playthroughs. Something about the physics based puzzles combined with first person aiming made Strawhart a lot of fun to speedrun. I figured that appealing to that demographic of players could help retain audiences. I started pushing for features like an in game timer and a level select so players could easily time themselves and practice individual levels. In one of our post launch patches, those ideas were eventually added!