this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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When I read this kind of stories about game dev where unit tests are very optional, I don’t really regret not working in this industry, especially now with all the layoffs.
Working in enterprise software development really hammers in the importance of unit tests and integration tests.
It seems that obscure bugs are a much bigger deal when the customer is a billion-dollar bank compared to a single player, not that surprising really!
to be fair, the testing surface is significantly more varied in a game than in the average application
your average api is probably stateless, and input probably tops out at like 100 lines of json
a game uses probably like 8gb of memory to store its state
I wish we held game developers to the same level of scrutiny.
Different industries have different priorities, if the big boss says concentrating on features or releasing sooner is the priority then such is life
It doesn't necessarily work that way, though. If tests tell you you broke something immediately, you don't have time to forget how anything works, so identifying the problem and fixing it is much faster. For the kind of minor bug that's potentially acceptable to launch a game with, if it's something tests detect, it's probably easier to fix than it is to determine whether it's viable to just ignore it. If it's something tests don't detect, it's just as easy to ignore whether it's because there are no tests or because despite there being tests, none of them cover this situation.
The games industry is rife with managers doing things that mean developers have a worse time and have the opposite effect to their stated goals. A good example is crunch. It obviously helps to do extra hours right before a launch when there's the promise of a holiday after the launch to recuperate, but it's now common for games studios to be in crunch for months and years at a time, despite the evidence being that after a couple of weeks, everyone's so tired from crunch that they're less productive than if they worked normal hours.
Games are complicated, and building something complicated in a mad rush because of an imposed deadline is less effective than taking the time to think things through, and typically ends up failing or taking longer anyway.