On 14 December 2020, Oliver Heldt from CipSoft visited us to talk about their testing process. CipSoft is an independent developer and operator of online games from Regensburg, best known for ‘Tibia’.

In the eyes of others, a game tester is quite a lot of things: an all-day gamer, a cheater/hacker, the developers’ final boss… But what does a game tester actually do?

It is often unclear what is a bug and what is a feature. Many a bug was simply turned into a feature. So why test at all? Many bugs also have drawbacks, disturb smooth gameplay and thereby annoy the community. It is therefore in the developer’s interest to find and fix all bugs as early as possible. That is where the testers come in.

What does a tester need to bring along? Technical and subject knowledge are important, of course, but so are communication skills, both within the team and when working with the developers. A feeling for games is essential too: how do players think and act?

Most important is to find the ‘important’ errors. Graphical glitches, for example, have rather minor side effects, whereas more serious errors have to be fixed faster (e.g. in Tibia a ladder that does not work). To fix a bug, you first have to reproduce the ‘how’, and ideally afterwards the ‘why’. To make this easier, CipSoft uses a frontend debug client and other tools. Some interesting things come to light, e.g. Tibia has a whoopee cushion: walking over it pops up an animation saying ‘fart’. These can be stacked, and so can the animations. You can probably guess: with 1000 whoopee cushions the client crashed: buffer overflow…

So what does a tester’s day-to-day work at CipSoft look like? Mostly it is about ’live bugs’: players can report bugs, and these have to be sorted and verified. This is often not easy, as many variables are involved. Sometimes the community is brought in as well ;)