JAckbox Party Pack 4 (5 Full Games)

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Studio Size: 30

Team Size: 6

Role: Contract QA Tester.

Credits: "QA" on 5 separate games.

Development Cycle: 1 year (I was with the team for 6 months).

Description: The Jackbox Party Pack 4 is the fourth installment in the Jackbox Party Pack franchise by Jackbox Games. Party Pack 4 is a collection of five party games where players connect with a phone, tablet, or PC, and complete gameplay tasks. Some games have players drawing, others have them answering trivia questions, and there's even a monster dating simulator in there. I was a contract QA Tester with Jackbox Games.

Core Tasks:

-Black Box, White Box, Regression, Submission, and Playtesting.

-Developing and executing test cases. 

-Ensuring all test case completion and bug reporting in JIRA.

POSTMORTEM

What went well:

-This was my first experience in an established studio, and gave me incredible insight into the complete start to finish development process.

-I had a strong ability to hunt down hard to find A and B level bugs, and there were many occasions where I would find bugs no one else seemed to reproduce. 

-Jackbox has unique controller technology, where players connect to the game with a phone, pc, or tablet, and they publish on all major consoles, pc, mac, and microconsoles. This allowed me ample testing experience in many unique controller and console environments.

What went wrong:

-Given the near infinite combination of game and controller environment, we weren't able to squash every bug by launch.

-Capturing video of bugs in certain game environments was challenging, which made creating easy to view bug reports difficult.

What I learned:

-Any game you make will get infinitely more test hours by your players on launch than your QA team in development.

-How to write a concrete bug report with reproduction steps, video or screenshot examples, and expected user behaviors. 

-Immediate insight into the complete start-to-finish game development process in all disciplines.

-This isn't really something I "learned" and more something that occurred: I always felt like I was a valued part of Jackbox Games and never felt like I was "just the contracted QA guy."