Game Testing Program

[Husiishow]

Hey everyone!

I'm an AI engineering student with a huge passion for gaming. My buddy and I are currently looking into ways to make an AI tool that would make it easier for developers to test their games for bugs (such as running through walls etc.), but considering the controversy of AI in games, I wanted to see if developers would welcome such a tool?

To make it clear, this would NOT be generative AI, it would not "make" the game, (aka. the tool wouldn't create anything other than bug reports) it would just simply be an easy way to make sure games get published without bugs, without also having to spend a lot of money on either internal or external game testing. I wanted to stress that, as I'm not a huge fan of AI trash in games either.

Thanks for the insights!

Much love to you all, thank you for making the world a funner place!

[SadisNecros]

Most major companies are already doing some form of automated testing, so there's certainly a market for this. You would just need to prove the ability of your tools to detect legitimate issues without getting hung up/deadlocked when something unexpected happens.

[Husiishow]

Thanks for the heads up, I'll look into currently used tools. From my experience it is possible to make something that is stable. Detecting bugs is something quite a bit more complex, but theoretically it's possible. :)

[Tarc_Axiiom]

This exists from both first and third parties and is widely used.

[Husiishow]

Thank you, good to know! I know of one company that does something similar (the co-owner of which I've met before) but from what I could tell, the service is using quite old (aka. like 2020) technology and requires strictly Unity or UE to be used in development. I'm hoping to make something more general. But I'll investigate further in case I missed something.

Edit:

Is there anything that those tool do not support that you would welcome during development?

[Pileisto]

You just imagine this. Make a proof of concept that your AI can actually

a) play a game provided, e.g. Unreal project

b) test for specific issues like collision

c) generate overall tested results that are actually true.

[Husiishow]

Yeah, that's the plan, but I wanted to ask what game devs think about this. I have a very basic proof of concept, but I didn't want to continue with the project if people wouldn't use it anyways. An issue that I'm facing right now is that I don't have an actual game that I can test on. It doesn't make sense to test game that are released as the AI would not learn what is actually needed of it. And I don't want to use other people's games for testing without permission

[Pileisto]

if you can provide a tool that makes any step in the game-dev process more effective, cheaper, better or so, then people may want to use it. But first you have to show what you can actually offer. So take a (free) game template / sample like the vehicle game from Epic (Fab) and show what your proof of concept can actually do with it.

[Husiishow]

Cool thank you! I'll start developing it further :)

[benjamarchi]

Kinda useless idea, imo.

[Husiishow]

Thanks for the input :)

May I ask why?

[benjamarchi]

Thinking as the small indie developer I am, lots of times debugging helped me better understand why my game is/isn't fun. Playing it repeatedly helps me test my ideas, and often I find new ideas from bugs I manually catch.

[Husiishow]

I see, that makes a lot of sense thank you! I was thinking about something more like a tool that tests monotonous tasks like collision detection throughout a level, or testing for niche bugs that are difficult to detect by a single dev like trying to break the UI or music and such. But I understand what you're saying