QA has been hectic at Champlain this semester.
One of the biggest issues our team has encountered in the production of our new game "Through Rust we Are Returned" has been finding a way to get QA done. Normally, Champlain College has a dedicated QA studio we are required to attend a few times a year that makes sure everyone gets their game tested by their peers. This year, with all the chaos caused by Covid, things have been a lot more confusing: QA is being done through an online program that a lot of people have been having issues connecting to. Because of this, our team has been unable to get any good QA done through the usual sources at Champlain.
This being said, we've gotten a lot of good feedback about our project from both internally within the team and also from our classmates in our capstone class.
One big issue that quickly got fixed (simply by internal dialogue within the team) was actually an issue with my writing. As I believe I've mentioned in previous posts, our game is set in Cyberpunk version of Victorian London. Specifically, it thematically deals with issues of class relations and the main character, Angel, was originally going to have a cockney dialect in how I wrote her. After getting feedback from the team about some of their initial dialogue, this choice ended up posing three major issues. Firstly, it simply made Angel's dialogue hard to read. Writing in that dialect at a base level involved misspelling a lot of words which made it a lot harder to understand. Secondly, Angel's personality became a lot harder to grasp and her only identifying trait quickly became "cockney". Lastly, writing in an overly cockney voice could be construed as offense or demeaning to cockney folks themselves. This was DEFINITELY not my goal.
Overall, this feedback allowed me to see weaknesses in my writing I hadn't before. Angel now has her cockney identified through the use of slang which allows this dialect to be a part of her character without dominating it.