We’re still early in VR, and there’s not a lot of competition. Just like in the early days of mobile, it’s a goldmine ready for you to jump into. But figuring out how to get started with testing and developing VR is definitely the hardest part. In this episode, Jason Weimann, author of the Virtual Reality Developer course will discuss some of his experience in testing and developing VR games. Discover what you need to know to get started learning the skills to help you develop and test VR games.

About Jason

Jason Weimann is the author of the Virtual Reality Developer and the Intro to Unity3D courses.

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

• Most video game stuff that I’ve seen and worked on there aren’t really any good existing tools and there definitely was nothing when I when I started doing this. There were no real automation tools that would work well with a video game. So instead what we generally did was build up our own tools. Then there was still a whole lot of manual testing.
  
• Just having a simple way to set up a script that runs through on the client, does some number of actions, and then give us me back our data even in a text file would have been amazing. It would have been a huge timesaver because it was really just here’s the list of stuff that’s changed. Go in and check all of it manually. So if we had a simple way to run through some basic tests and automate that it would have been awesome. All of that would have needed to be built kind of into the engine or have some API calls. I could hook into and control the engine with that although that was generally frowned upon because of all the people that would do it for botting. It would have been nice to have a developer version that could do that so we could run through the basic smoke test of No. Create a new character, run around and kill something, see if you get experience. You’ll know 10 things and see if your level goes up. All of that stuff theoretically could have been automated just with some access to basic API calls to control the client and have everything go through there and that would have been amazing.
  
• I usually do a lot of testing when I’m not playing bingo for money. I like to go with TDD model and have unit tests over all the key paths. It stems from a lot of my experience doing business apps and stuff and I really love the value of test-driven development. When I’m doing the actual game parts there’s I’d say a lot less. It generally comes down to adding a feature, testing that feature manually, making sure it’s good and then moving on to the next one. There’s very little regression testing that I end up doing and very little just manual testing. And I had to almost never do any test automation in game and a lot of that is just that with the game engines they really don’t make it easy.
  
• There are some things that you could do I think to automate a bit of that but in my experience it hasn’t been a priority at all and I think it was just that a lot of the games you know launch and maybe have an update or two but then they’re done which is kind of the opposite of most business stuff. Most business software work on you have to support it for 5 10 20 years. So you want to make sure that you have a good testing process for that because it’s constantly getting updated. The games, once they’re out and their first or second Update is out they’re usually pretty much done for unless they’re a huge hit. In which case they have giant teams built around QA for that.
  
• So when I really need to test virtual reality games I have a tried and true method of having one of my kids to stand there with a headset on and do it with thing I’d tell them for hours on end. The problem is that with VR ones it’s even harder to test things just because all of the interaction and it’s no longer just like mouse and keyboard interaction that you could possibly make out and you know easily automate with VR it’s you know where’s my head what direction am I looking. Where are my hands? Because I’ve got controllers in my hands and how am I using those. And there’s a whole lot to it. The other part is the visuals for VR. It’s really hard to tell what’s going on from outside the headset versus inside. So when you look it ends in a headset you see a bit different from what you see on onscreen. And you get that real perspective of size and height and everything else that you can’t really determine when you’re just looking at it in a flat 2D view. Why it’s such a big game changer. Get that extra immersion and the only way is when I test now if I’m doing real testing like I said I’ll grab one of the kids and have and they’re like hey try this. I’ll make a little adjustment try this. Luckily the integration time on that is really fast with an engine like Unity to go and make a little change at play again and 2 seconds later it’s back up on their face right. And then when I’m testing solo I just test with a headset on my lap just kind of spin it around.
  

Connect with Jason Weimann

• Twitter:@jweimann
• Blog: unity3d.college

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