KARTRIDGE (Downloadable games Platform)
Studio Size: 50
Kartridge Team Size: 20
QA Team Size: 3
Role: QA Tester.
Development Cycle: 3 years (I was with the team for 1.5 years)
Description: Kartridge is a player friendly and developer focus downloadable games storefront currently available via open beta developed by Kongregate. Kartridge focuses on developer freedom and Kongregate’s strong history with building player communities to develop a unique experience that is unlike any other. Players can socialize, earn rewards, and play games while enjoying Kartridge. I was a QA Tester with Kongregate on the Kartridge team.
Core Tasks:
-Black Box, White Box, Regression, Submission and Smoke testing.
-Ownership of new features released on a bi-weekly patch schedule.
-Ensuring all test case completion and bug reporting in Pivotal Tracker.
-Creating and releasing builds of Kart to the general public via Github.
POSTMORTEM
What went well:
-Kongregate is a well established company that learned from past mistakes and perpetuated previous success. This permeates into Kartridge.
-Players really feel ‘at home’ with Kartridge. They understand everything we wanted them to do as soon as they boot up Kartridge, and it feels distinctly like a Kongregate branded product.
-As a whole, the entire public life of the project (public announcement, open beta) has been overwhelmingly successful.
What went wrong:
-There were some growing pains regarding our first users in and their initial reaction to Kartridge.
-Processes needed to grow and adapt as the focus and feel of Kartridge changed over time.
-The addition of platforms (web, mobile) resulted in growing demand for release candidate testing.
What I learned:
-There is a very strong and relatively untapped metric of players that rests in between the AAA player and the indie player.
-Familiarity with several processes that I previously haven’t been to this point: making builds, releasing them, managing a platform, payment systems, admin tools, live projects.
-Insight into the start-to-finish agile development process, and how that applies outside of game development.
-Kongregate is awesome!