PROCESSED GRAPHICS IN GAME DEVELOPMENT: QUALITY ASSURANCE AND TESTING

Abstract

While AI-generated and otherwise processed assets are still relatively new topics, their less sophisticated counterparts are not. Custom-made generated graphical assets may be useful in game development as placeholder assets for prototyping, background graphics for side scrollers or simple character sprites. There is another possible use of them in the field of quality assurance and game testing, particularly live playtests (playthroughs by actual human players instead of algorithms). QA can be done by game developers, publishers should they choose to do so or players and in some cases by mod authors and mod users (provided the game in question can be modded at all). Following article explores actual, already released, practical examples of such modifications in the form that they were considered as “most useful for the end user” and fulfilling their intended task. All of them, as well as principles they are based on, can be useful for the development of future games and interactive content in professional or academic settings, since the base assumption of wanting to produce best possible quality of work that is sufficiently optimized and can work on PCs of varying performance levels is universal to both of them.