Beta

At Beta, all assets are integrated, all development stops, and the only thing that happens thereafter is bug fixing. Stray bits of art can be upgraded, or bits of text rewritten, but the goal at this point is to stabilize the project and eliminate as many bugs as is necessary before shipping.

Compliance Testing

If yours is a console game that is subject to the approval of the console manufacturer, the final weeks of Beta will include submissions to that company so its testers can verify that the game meets their own quality standards.

A PC game can be sent to an outside testing firm for compatibility testing. This should uncover any pieces of hardware, or combinations of hardware, that keep the game from working properly.

A mobile game may need approval from handset manufacturers and/or the wireless carriers that will be hosting the game and making it available to their subscribers for downloading. The handset manufacturers are mostly concerned about interoperation with the phone's built-in features, while the carriers want to be confident that the game will not disrupt service on their network.

Crunch Time

The last portion of Beta testing has come to be called crunch time . During these weeks, people have been known to stay in the office for days at a time, sleep under their desks, eat nothing but carryout, ingest massive amounts of caffeine , and become strangers to their families. All in all, it's a weird twilight world where the only important thing is finishing the game.

When this goes well, you end up with a team of dedicated people who believe they're working on something special and are willing to make sacrifices in other areas of their lives to see this creation come out right. The people work hard because they want to, because it's important to them, and because it's fun. Their motivation comes from an internal desire rather than an external mandate . If you've ever worked hard with a group of people to achieve a cherished goal, you know how exhilarating and rewarding it can be.

On the other hand, when it goes poorly, you have people who feel pressured to put in long hours so that they won't lose their jobs, who don't care what's in the game as long as it gets done, and who feel bitter and exploited. If you've ever had to grind away at a pointless task that was doomed to failure anyway, you know how mind numbing and soul deadening that can be.

When it goes really poorly, crunch time turns into a death march , which is any period of extraordinary effort that lasts more than one month. Avoid this at all costs. The benefits of overtime are lost in mistakes caused by exhaustion. Apathy sets in. The team breaks down. You are very likely to deliver the game later than if you just kept plugging along in the first place. If you ever find yourself saying, "We can make the deadline if everyone works two months of mandatory overtime," take a deep breath , step back, and re-evaluate.

Crunch time does come to every project. When it arrives, be prepared to walk on eggshells. As time runs out, emotions run high and tempers can flare. One of the hardest parts of making a game is the last-minute agonizing over how important any given bug is. Such decisions are likely to be made in the supercharged atmosphere of too little time and not enough sleep. In these final days, try to keep your sense of proportion, understand that there is rarely a "right" decision, and remember that even if you disagree with what is happening, you still need to work for the good of the game.

Finally, when putting together the release-candidate disks, always work from a punch-list and have two people check off each task as it is performed. Trusting a single exhaustion-addled engineer to remember all the ins and outs of creating the final disk is a recipe for disaster.

Beta Test

The Beta test phase not only gives developers valuable gameplay and balance feedback, but it's also a great way for the game team to check for defects they may have missed because there simply weren't enough testers to execute massive multiplayer test scenarios.

Some games have a "Closed Beta" testing period where testers are either randomly chosen or hand-picked based on information they send in when they request to participate. Depending on the project plan or the results from the Closed Beta, there may be a subsequent "Open Beta" period. During this time applicants who were not selected for Closed Beta can participate, as well as any new players who apply during this time. Other rounds of Beta testing may be defined with their own specific objectives, such as testing how well an MMORPG performs with a fully loaded world server.