I think the key here is that the perceived cost / benefit ratio is too high. It's the perception that drives their behavior though. I'm in a company now that has zero unit tests, because they just don't see the value in it (and in their case they may be right for a whole slew of reasons).
Also, remember that games are not very long-lived pieces of software. You build it, release it, maybe patch it, and move on. If the game moves to version 2 then you're probably going to re-write most of the game from scratch. When you support software for a decade then the code is what's valuable, and unit tests keep institutional knowledge about the code. But with disposable software like games, the mechanics of the game and IP are what's valuable.
Why would you write a unit test for something you know you're going to throw away in 6 months?
I don’t understand why people don’t just add one test even if the codebase otherwise has zero tests if they’re so scared of one area and I don’t get why people keep adding excessive coverage if it’s wasting their time.
It’s like people pick a stance and then stick with it forever when I couldn’t care less how I’ve been doing something for 10 years if today you showed me a better way.
This doesn't sound so much as too much coverage but rather like having your automated tests be coupled to implementation details. This has a multitude of possible causes, for example too the tests being too granular (prefer testing at the boundary of your system). I've worked in codebases where test-implementation detail coupling was taken seriously, and in those I've rarely had to write a commit message like "fix tests", and all that without losing coverage.
We would write tests to catch a bug in a low level system, and keep the test after. We had lots of Design by Contract, including Invariants that were enabled in debug mode.
But the reality was that we couldn't test gameplay code very well. That changed so dramatically over the course of a project that if we did test we would just end up commenting tests by the end of a project.
And as an optimisation guy, I would often have to change the "feel" of gameplay code to get performance out of code, which is checked by a Quality Assurance team, because it's subjective. That kind of stuff would make gameplay tests very brittle.
The pace of game Dev was incredibly fast. We were struggling to get all our stuff in, never mind adding any scaffolding that would slow us down.
I am pretty sure there is some sort of automated testing happening that is catching these bugs before release.
Games are extremely hard to test. For me it falls into the same category like GUI testing frameworks which imho are extremely annoying and brittle. Except that games are comparable to a user interface consisting of many buttons which you can short and long press and drag around while at the same time other bots are pressing the same buttons, sharing the same state influenced by a physics engine.
How do you test such a ball of mud which also constantly changes by devs trying to follow the fun? Yes you can unittest individual, reusable parts. But integration tests, which require large, time sensitive modules, all strapped together and running at the same time? It's mindboggling hard.
Moreover if you're in a conceptual phase of development and prototyping and idea, tests make no sense. The requirements change all the time and complex tests hold you back. But the funny thing is, that game development stays in that phase most of the time. And when the game is done, you start a new one with a completely different set of requirements.
There are exceptions, like League of Legends. The game left the conceptual phase many years ago and its rules are set in stone. And a game which runs successfully for that long is super rare.
[1] https://technology.riotgames.com/news/automated-testing-leag...
I will say that I've never said "I wish I didn't write a test for that". I have also never said, "your PR is fine, but please delete that test, it's useless".
I throw away a lot of code. I still test stuff I expect to throw away. That's because it probably needs to run once before I throw it away, and I can't start throwing it away until it works :/
What it comes down to is what else you have to spend your time on. Sometimes you need to experiment with a feature; get it out to customers, and if it's buggy and rough around the edges, it's OK, because you were just trying out the idea. But sometimes that's not what you want; whatever time you spend on support back and forth finding a bug would have been better spent not doing that. The customer needed something rock solid, not an experiment. Test that so they don't have to.
There are no rules. "Write a test for every change" is just as invalid and unworkable as "Never write any tests". It's a spectrum, and each change is going to land somewhere different. If you're unsure, ask a coworker. I have been testing stuff for 20+ years, and I usually guess OK (that is when I take a shortcut and don't test as much as I should, it's rarely the thing that caused the production outage), but a guess is just that, a guess. Solicit opinions.
This was true a couple decades ago. Nowadays many games are cash cows for decades. Path of Exile was released in 2013, Minecraft in 2011, and World of Warcraft in 2004, and all of those continue to receive regular updates (and have over the course of their lives) and still make plenty of money today. Dwarf Fortress has been in continual development since 2002! (Although probably not your ideal cash-flow model.)
Or you have the EA Sports model where you use the same "engine" and just re-skin some things and re-release the same game over and over. There has been a new "Football Manager" game every year since 2005 -- do you really think they throw out all their code and start over every year?
Wasn't Minecraft completely rewritten from scratch in Java after a few years?
And the EA one, like you said, it's just model updates. Very few gameplay mechanics get more than a simple tweak. Just recompile with the new models. You don't need unit tests if the code never changes.
Though I'm sitting at a hobbyist with electrical and commissioning background.
We're also in an industry with a ton of competitors.
On top of that, the company was founded by some very junior engineers. for most of them this was their first or second job out of college. Literally every anti-pattern is in our codebase, and a lot of them are considered best practices by them. Unit tests were perceived as a cost with little benefit, so none were written. New engineers were almost always new grads to save on money.
These facts combined make for an interesting environment.
For starters, leadership is afraid to ship new code, or even refactor existing code. Partially because nobody knows how it works, partially because they don't have unit tests to verify that things are going well. All new code has to be gated by feature flags (there's an experiment right now to switch from try-finally to try-with-resources). If there isn't a business reason to add code, it gets rejected (I had a rejected PR that removed a "synchronized" block from around "return boolValue;"). And it's hard to say they're wrong. If we push out a bad release, there's a very real chance that our customers will pack up and migrate to one of our competitors. Why risk it?
And the team's experience level plays a role too. With so many junior engineers and so much coding skill in-breeding, "best practices" have become pretty painful. Code is written without an eye towards future maintainability, and the classes are a gas factory mixed with a god object. It's not uncommon to trace a series of calls through a dozen classes, looping back to classes that you've already looked at. And trying to isolate chunks of the code is difficult. I recently tried to isolate 6 classes and I ended up with an interface that used 67 methods from the god object, ranging from logging, to thread management, to http calls, to state manipulation.
And because nobody else on the team has significant experience elsewhere, nobody else really sees the value of unit tests. They've all been brought up in this environment where unit test are not mentioned, and so it has ingrained this idea that they're useless.
So the question is how do you fix this and move forward?
Ideally we'd start by refactoring a couple of these classes so that they could be isolated and tested. While management doesn't see significant value in unit tests, they're not strictly against them, but they are against refactoring code. So we can't really add unit tests on the risky code. The only places that you can really add them without pushback would be in the simplest utility classes, which would benefit from them the least, and in doing so prove to management that unit tests aren't really valuable. And I mean the SIMPLEST utility classes. Most of our utility classes require the god object so that we can log and get feature flags.
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit (start over from scratch with stronger principles). It's the only way to be sure. But there's no way I'm convincing management to let the entire dev team have the year they'd need to do that with feature parity, and leadership would only see it as a massive number of bugs to fix.
In the meantime developer velocity is slowing, but management seems to see that as a good thing. Slower development translates into more stable code in their minds. And the company makes enough that it pays well and can't figure out what to do with the excess money. So nobody really sees a problem. Our recruiters actually make this a selling point, making fun of other companies that say their code is "well organized".
All product development involves poorly defined boundaries where the product meets the user, where requirements shift frequently, and where the burdens of test maintenance have to be weighed against the benefits.
You don’t throw out all of unit testing because it doesn’t work well for a subset of your code. You throw out all of unit testing because writing tests is annoying, none of your coworkers have set it up, and the rest of your industry doesn’t do it, so you feel justified in not doing it either.
I was guilty of this myself back when I was an indie dev. It took me an embarrassingly long time, for example, to admit that git wasn’t just something teams needed to coordinate, and that I should be using it as the sole developer of a project.
E.g. this article uses an example of removing the number 5, causing the developer to have to implement a base-9 numbering system. Unit tests that confirm this custom base number system is working as expected would be extremely reassuring to have. Alternatively, you could keep the base-10 system everyone is familiar with, and just have logic to eliminate or transform any 5s. This would normally be far too risky, but high coverage testing could provide strong enough assurance to trust that your “patched base-10” isn’t letting any 5s through.
The same is true for the other examples - unit testing feels like the first thing I’d reach for when told about flaming numbers.
“Testing that the code does what it does” is of course a terrible waste of both the time spent writing those tests, and of future time spent writing code under those tests. With skill and practice at writing tests, you make that mistake less often. Perhaps there’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy for game developers: due to industry convention, they’re unfamiliar with writing tests, they try writing tests, they end up with a superfluous-yet-restrictive test suite, thus proving the wisdom of the industry convention against testing.
It's like testing that the website landing page is blue. Sure you can but breaking that rule is certainly valid and you'll end up ripping out a lot of tests that way.
Now, instead of calcifying the designer's whims, testing should be focused around things that actually need to make sense, ie abstract systems, data structures etc etc.
With high coverage and dry-ish tests, changing the tests first and seeing which files start failing can function as a substitute for find+replace - by altering the tests to reflect the whims, it’ll tell you all the places you need to change your code to express said whims.
There's also https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ThreadSafetyAnalysis.html which can statically catch some threading issues, though I've not used it much myself.
This has saved me a bunch of times when I've be doing work in code with proneness to those kind of issues. Sometimes it will just lead to a flaky test, but the investigation of the flake will usually find the root cause in the end.
Citation needed.
> can you imagine
Yes I can, because several languages have tooling built specifically for finding those race conditions.
If you built it, you can test it. If you can’t test it, you don’t understand what you built.
In their case their flagship game is full of bugs, and they had to ship their product asap pre-aquistion when they were a startup.
Because of the mentality of the managers, and weak minded devs, they don't write unit tests, and instead spend the vast majority of their days fighting bugs, so much so they have to hire dedicated staff for their (single game) backlog as they were struggling to keep up "with its success".
This is BS of course, I saw their backlog and it was a shit show, with Devs expected to work overtime free of charge to get actual features out (funny how this works isn't it, never affects the business execs' time/life who make the demands of no tests).
I was asked what I would bring to the company to help them support their now AAA game, and I stated up front "more unit tests" and indirectly criticised their lack of them. I got a call later that day that (the manager thought) "I would not be a good fit".
I got a lead job elsewhere that has the company's highest performing team, literally because of testing practices being well balanced between time and effectiveness (i.e. don't bother with low value tests, add tests if you find a bug etc, if an integration test takes too long leave it and use unit tests).
I think back to that interview every time I interview at games studios now, and wonder if I shouldn't push unit tests if they're missing. I'd still do it. The managers at that job were assholes to their developers, and I now recognise the trait in a company.
QA processes do a good job catching the rest.
In any games company I've worked for the designer is responsible for mapping and balancing the rules and mechanics of the game, they would provide a specification of what "red vs blue numbers" would look like and a balanced idea of how to remove the number 5 from the game (balancing and changing the rules like this being entirely within the domain of game design). incidentally any game company I've worked at has had an extensive set of test suites.
2. Anything primarily visual, audio, and control input based is extremely hard to reliably automate testing. Thus, if the clipping glitches are improbable and hardly noticeable... no one cares.
Some people did get around the finer game-play issues by simply allowing their AI character to cheat. Mortal Kombat II was famous for the impossible moves and combos the AI would inflict on players... yet the release was still super popular, as people just assumed they needed more practice with the game.
Have fun out there, =)
You're conflating unit tests and functional/integration tests there. A unit test should test that a single function/method/class does what it's expected to do. The game design changes should change how they are put together, but not often what they do. If your setThingOnFire() method suddenly also flips things upside down, you're going to have a bad day. Instead your callers should add calls to flipThingUpsideDown().
I have a reasonably clean separation between the UI and the rest of the code, but I don't have any unit tests for the UI (I think - correct me if I'm wrong here - that would require integration tests rather than unit tests?) What I'm trying to say is that, if you don't do it this way around, and/or you have multiple programmers writing the game at once, and/or you _really_ optimise for performance, I can imagine that would make it much harder to write unit tests.
In some situations unit tests can be very effective and useful, such as in testing complex algorithms, or in code bases where some serious refactoring is required, and where one don't want to break existing behavior. In backend development, where user facing output is limited, there is typically no other practical way to check that things are working properly.
However, in games, and typical front-end development, especially in its early stages, it can be beneficial to be as flexible as possible. And however way you put it, unit tests simply make your code more rigid.
In the latter situation, some people prefer guard rails and find that they are more flexible with unit tests in place. Others prefer not to care about unit tests and attain higher productivity without them.
Only when an application grows to a certain size where a developer does not naturally inspect typical behavior all day, and if quality is important, it starts to make sense to put in automated testing, because it is simply more cost effective.
Similar reasoning goes for dynamic vs static typing.
It seems that some people think that everyone should always use the same approach for any kind of software development, because it worked for them at some point in time. Over time I have grown a preference to avoid working with such people.
Now, do most game makers take the time to do this? No, because they will likely have a lot else to do and make an excuse not to do it. However, for the most vital tech foundations, it is a good idea.
What gamedev does tend to do more often is smoke testing. Just load up each level and see if it runs out of memory or not. Automated testing on build to see if something broke. It's less granular than unit testing, but when you're building over and over in the heat of a closeout on a project, this type of thing can tease out a breaking bug early as well.
Overall, I like the title of the OP article, but not much that's said within.
I do buy the argument that the trade off between effort and value is different, but that's because it's harder to unit test user interactions than it is to unit test a physics engine.
It's more or less the reason in the early life of the web few did end to end testing involving browsers, or unit tested iOS apps in the first releases of the iPhone.
* "Automated Testing of Gameplay Features in 'Sea of Thieves'": https://www.youtube.com/embed/X673tOi8pU8?si=uj_lcMEC9nvMpa6...
~via https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1026366/Automated-Testing-of-G... :
"Automated testing of gameplay features has traditionally not been embraced by the industry, due to the perceived time required and difficulty in creating reliable tests. Sea of Thieves however was created with automated testing for gameplay from the start. This session explains why automated testing was the right choice for Sea of Thieves and how it could benefit your game. It shows the framework that was built by Rare to let team members create automated tests quickly and easily, the different test types we built, and what level of test coverage was found to be appropriate. The session also contains best practices for making tests work reliably and efficiently, using clear worked through examples."
Looks like there's also related talks in later years (which may or may not be currently available as free-to-view--I've not watched these ones):
* "Lessons Learned in Adapting the 'Sea of Thieves' Automated Testing Methodology to 'Minecraft'": https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1027345/Lessons-Learned-in-Ada...
* "Automated Testing of Shader Code" (GDC 2024): https://schedule.gdconf.com/session/automated-testing-of-sha...
Sources ?
Having said that, sometimes you need unit tests. Overwatch had this bug where there is an ultimate ability called "amplification matrix" that is a window that you shoot through and the bullets do twice as much damage. One patch, that stopped working. This kind of issue is pretty easy to miss in play testing; if you're hitting headshots, then the bullets are doing the 2x damage they would if they were body shots that got properly amplified. If is very hard to tell damage numbers while play testing (as evidenced by how many patches are "we made character X do 1 more damage per bullet", and it smooths things out over the scale of millions of matches, but isn't really that noticeable to players unless breakpoints change). So for this reason, write an integration test where you set up this window thingie, put an enemy behind it, fire a bullet at a known point, and require.Equals(damage, 200). Ya just do it, so you don't ship the bug, make real people lose real MMR, and then have to "git stash" that cool thing you're working on today, check out the release branch, and uncomment the code that makes the amp matrix actually work. Games are just software engineering. Fun software engineering. But it's the same shit that your business logic brothers and sisters are working on.
(Overwatch also had a really neat bug, that the community believes was due to a x == 0 check instead of an x < 0 check. If you pressed the right buttons while using Bastion's ultimate, you had infinite ammo. Normally it fires 3 air strikes, but if you got that counter to decrement twice and skip the == 0 check, then you got to do it an infinite number of times. (Well, actually 2^32 or 2^64 times. Eventually you'd integer overflow and have the chance to hit 0 again. Anyway, this was absolutely hilarious whenever it happened in game. The entire map would turn into a bunch of targets for artillery shells, the noise to alert you of incoming missiles would play 100 times more than normal, and it was total chaos as everyone on your team died. And not even that gamebreaking; both teams have the option to run the same characters, so you could just do it back to your opponent. Very fun, but they fixed the bug quickly.
Follow up follow up: all of these silly bugs are in ultimates, which come up the least often of all abilities in the games. That's what happens with playtesting. You don't get test coverage where you need it. A test you write covers the stuff you're most scared about. A careful engineer that likes testing would have never shipped these.)
I do question the "fun" part. Midnight crunches, unpaid overtime and - as far as I have read - some of the worst working conditions in all of software engineering. I pass.
I still play the games I used to work on professionally from time to time, and like to show them off to people, even though none were financially successful (a few I worked on solo were at least popular, but we made some 'bad decisions in hindsight' or got really unlucky with release timing for all the games I worked on professionally).
I don't care hardly at all about all the webdev projects I worked on professionally. They each had some intresting problem solving or coding challenges, and some of them were used WAY more than the games I made were played, but I'm still more into the games I made, and those are most likely to still be around after I'm dead, in a Flash game or ROM archive or torrent somewhere.
Also, the worst long hours I ever had was actually in webdev. I once worked in software for a call center, and whenever the phone systems went down, I was expected to be on a call to help fix it (as there was 100+ call center employees that couldn't make calls and we were losing lots of money every minute they were down), sometimes for 16 hours or more sitting on a Zoom call, mostly waiting for people on the server teams to figure things out. And there was a data center migration that had some unexpected problems and required three of us to work for almost three days straight (I literally worked a 24 hour shift, then had 4 hours of sleep, then worked an 18 hour shift right after it).
But that's not the norm in webdev at least. My current webdev job I only worked >40 hours a couple weeks to rework some issues with some junior dev's code for a feature before a big demo.
