[411111111111111]

I've always wondered why big studios don't employ some people that just write bots to play through scenarios etc.

I mean the biggest issue with creating good bots is getting the required data to make decisions such as "you're getting attacked, you need to use this ability" etc, but if you're actually the company writing the game, there shouldn't be any issues creating APIs for that. Or even going directly into memory and read it out, you don't need to worry about getting banned after all.

Imagine Integrationtests in the form of bot scenarios. Is that too much overhead to implement in the usually very budged oriented setting of game development?

[nradov]

You can write a bot player that follows a script or applies some simple decision rules. The hard part is detecting whether or not the game is operating correctly at each step. It's not like a simple web application where things happen in discrete steps and you can inspect the DOM to verify that it contains the right nodes.

[dahart]

Lots of big and small studios have tried to automate game testing. They are interested in it, so if it seems easy and fun you should do it, I’m sure there are jobs out there writing game testing bots.

That said, it would be wise to assume that if you have not heard much about this and wondered why, the answer is probably that it’s harder than you think.

Having been a game lead for a decade, I can safely say that getting game telemetry into the test bots is not the hardest part of the job, it’s one of the easiest things to do. One example of something much more difficult would be testing the game while it changes. Don’t forget that writing a cheat bot for a game that’s done is nothing like testing games that are in development and changing every day.

[kaba0]

How would it tell that something is wrong? Like, it went through a wall, and the app let it do so - what’s the problem?

Testing non-deterministic code paths are a really hard problem because you don’t really know what to test for.