Lead Production Tester for a AAA studio

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Hello anyone reading, especially you, Mr. Yahoo SlurpBot, you seem to follow me everywhere these days!

Most of the generic information about me can be found in my profile, so not much point repeating all of that. To say a bit more I've been a (professional) games tester for 6 months now and I'm mostly loving it. It looks like SEGA have some good titles in the works so the future looks bright. Anything more personal than that I tend to leave to private conversations (sorry, Mr. SlurpBot, we just don't know enough about eachother!), and I can't say anything about the games I'm testing or know are being tested unless I want to break my NDA and get myself fired, which I don't, so don't ask me.

In my spare time I am writing up a mod that currently goes by the name 'Victorian Detective Adventure'. It will be a fairly experimental mod for the Source (Half-Life 2) engine that will definitely not appeal to everyone, but anyone who likes good storytelling can expect a solid bit of entertainment verging more towards interactive fiction than thorogh-bred gaming. No website or forums for this yet, I'm going to keep it all fairly low-key until we have at least a working prototype of some of the main features. Production will start as soon as I am happily settled in a new flat and the design doc is more or less finished, which should be in a couple of months' time or so.
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Anyway, as you may have noticed I also write a big ol' article for the Mod Database every so often (usually relevant to mod management). The main point of this blog post was actually to say that I do try to constantly update these articles, so the best way to find out about any new additions or changes -or even new articles if they don't make the front page- is to watch my profile. I recently went through the Modular Development article and reformatted it completely so it still reads okay with all Intense's recent improvements to the WYSIWYG editor. The Public Relations tutorial is also due for a revamp. Finally I'm doing a QA tutorial at the moment which is a pretty comprehensive guide to designing and managing test programmes and actually testing your mod first-hand. This tutorial should be ready for public consumption in the next few weeks.

To be updated when this happens, watch my profile!

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KindredPhantom
KindredPhantom

So that's what you have been getting up to then Crispy.
This "Victorian Detective Adventure", is it going to be point and click like Broken Sword and the Old Lucas Art games?

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Crispy Author
Crispy

In a word: yes. But I can never leave things just as one word so I'll explain a bit more. It won't have the humour of either, and it most certainly won't be as long as either. It will have maybe 8-10 locations, two acts and it will be played out in first-person.

P.S. The testing tutorial is taking a bit longer since: a) it's grown into what will probably have to be two tutorials, one for test management and one for testing; b) it's crunchtime at work, so lots of weekend overtime and; c) flathunting is also taking up some time. Oh and: d) I finally got round to playing Bioshock after a recent PC upgrade.

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KindredPhantom
KindredPhantom

Cool, i hope you played bioshock with the Vita-Chambers disabled.
I played it with the Vita-Chambers enabled which was frankly too easy and disabling them makes them game better imo.

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Crispy Author
Crispy

Disabled them straight off the bat and I started on Hard mode. Then I thought that when I play hard mode I end up not saving enough and forcing myself to replay large chunks of the game when I die unexpectedly, so I switched to normal.

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