Séamus Ó Buadhacháin
Failbetter Games
Séamus is a senior programmer at Failbetter Games, and lead developer on the social simulation narrative game Mask of the Rose.
Séamus Ó Buadhacháin is speaking at the following session/s
Testing Branching Narrative at Scale: Lessons from Mask of the Rose
Projects with complex narratives can be unduly time-consuming to test, requiring multiple human playthroughs for each story choice. Mask of the Rose, a game with thousands of individual choices and millions of unique narrative routes, presented developers Failbetter Games with a serious testing challenge. This talk covers how we addressed the challenge of testing and debugging a branching narrative at tremendous scale, with a guidable random playthrough system that evolved from finding showstopping quest bugs to evaluating the flow of procedurally-generated conversations.
Session Takeaway
- The challenges of testing big narrative games
- The benefits and downsides of manual testing vs automated testing
- Challenges and pitfalls in developing automated testing for narrative-heavy games
Session speakers
