Embedded Files
First Year Team Project
Another Day is a narrative driven game that portrays the daily struggle experienced by those living in isolation in a claustrophobic environment during lockdown while suffering from depression and anxiety. Try your hardest to stay on top of an ever increasing list of daily tasks as you battle your internal conflicts. Another Day was the first major team project I worked on; being in my first year of University.
The game was part of the Cornwall House exhibition during the G7 Summit in 2021, and is part of mental health charity Safe In Our World's list of mental health related games and apps.
A micro post-mortem
Another Day is a narrative experience that follows the player through a week of living in lockdown, completing chores, completing monotonous and tedious tasks, and dealing with their mental health. We understood as developers that there was a huge weight on our shoulders to deliver a respectful experience; our game was dealing with heavy and mature topics. However, I feel that as a team we created a more than suitable experience: for a first year University game, Another Day was wildly successful.
Another Day was shown off at the 2021 Summer G7 summit, and was shown off at the Summer 2022 Falmouth University Games Expo on an arcade machine alongside a group of games under the label "Best Of All Time".
I worked the most on this project around concept design work and QA testing, creating a lengthy QA testing document to create a smooth and bug/issue free experience.
Despite its accolades, I feel that I could have contributed more to this game than I ended up doing. This isn't to say I didn't contribute suitably, but I feel that there could have been more I could have done.
This did however drive me to become a better designer, a result I felt in my second year, which you can read about below.
Art by Lou Rodham (Acceant)
QA Testing
QA Testing
For the majority of development, my focus was on QA assurance and testing. This process featured me being in constant communication with other designers and programmers especially, taking a dive into both the engine and code of the game to locate, document and resolve any issues I found.
For documentation and resolution of issues, after communication and meetings regarding the topic, our team decided to use Google Sheets. I created two ranking systems for issues that could arise, one denoting the severity of each issue, and another for the source of the issue.
We felt that QA assurance, for this game especially, was critical to the success of the game, and creating a suitable user experience. Another Day is a game that touches on senstitive, mature topics. We understood early on into development that in order to create a game that would be able to use these topics to create a compelling experience, any major bugs or issues that the player would encounter would drastically impact and devalue their experience with the game. There would be no point in creating a game that attempted to create this experience if said experience would be dampened and ruined by bugs and glitches that would take the player out of the game, and as such, QA testing for Another Day was set as a high priority.
This is an example of part of the QA document. Each issue had a title, severity level, the category of said issue, description of the issue and steps to how to recreate the issues. Alongside this, I had links alongside each issue that linked to team communication channels showcasing an image and further descriptions of any issues that could arise.
This communication channel was dedicated to the collection and archival of these images, as well as further detailing regarding bugs and developmental problems. The channel was commonly used, and acted as a basis for all communication regarding QA testing as a whole.
The spreadsheet was used in tandem with this communication channel by the majority of the team in order to create a polished final game, with few, if any noticeable issues for the player, ensuring a smooth playing experience.
A copy of the QA testing spreadsheet, and all 120 documented issues can be found here.
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