I remember playing Skyrim when it first came out. There, in the first open field near the first cave dungeon, there were two Giants just roaming around tempting me to do something about them.
Well, long story short, I tried killing them with my puny bow and arrows which didn’t work and one of them just kicked me and my guy got shot straight into the air and went through the skies like Superman taking flight. That was a glitch. A bug.
When there are flaws in the coding of programming of software then errors happen in its engagement and those errors are software bugs or just, bugs.
Not all the bugs in Skyrim are that hilarious, some of them are just pure agony and it is not just Skyrim, many of your favorite games have tons of bugs in them that is why every other game has patches released for them nowadays, case in point – Cyberpunk 2077 or Assassin’s Creed Series, etc.
Bugs can hurt the goodwill of a developer and any game series you are offering, it is better to be safe than sorry, so today we are going to know more about the most common bugs in video games and their origins and what to do about those pesky critters.
Origins of ‘bugs’ –
The word ‘bug’ has been in use to denote a fault in machinery long before computer softwares were invented, Grace Hopper first used the word ‘bug’ to denote a computer malfunction in September of 1947, although interestingly that was a real-life bug, a moth, which got trapped inside the hardware and made the machine dysfunctional.
Types of Bugs in Video Games –
There are two types of important bugs in video games that you have to look out for – the big bugs that hurt the gaming experiences directly and the small, minor ones that hurt the gaming experience indirectly or on smaller scales.
First the small ones…
There have been some serious studies about the game design failures that have brought forward two types of smaller gaming bugs – temporal and non-temporal glitches. Temporal failures of game design are those glitches when you can compare a game glitch with the game’s past run-throughs. Non-Temporal game glitches are bugs that you can only find by careful methods of inspection or by QA testing.
Some Non-Temporal Bugs are –
- Out of Bounds Objects (Where some object is seen outside the in-game world boundary)
- Invalid Graphical Representation (A character or object behaving irrelevant to its atmosphere)
- Invalid Change of Values (When a numerical value gets changed in an unnatural amount or doesn’t change at all)
- Artificial Stupidity (An NPC not doing its intended action or is breaking the image of any intelligence)
Some Temporal Bugs Are –
- Invalid positioning over time (Some character or object doing unnatural motion over time)
- Invalid Context state over time (NPCs or objects not interacting with the game events logically)
- Invalid event occurrence over time (an improper game function which is too frequent or too infrequent)
- Interrupted Event (any action that has suddenly stopped working without any warning)
- Implementation responses issues (Game software not interacting perfectly with base hardware)
What we have just discussed are minor but important bugs that require professional QA testers and weeks-long trial and error playthroughs to find them out however, now we are going to talk about the big and important bugs in video games, these are the kind of common bugs in video games you do not need any precise QA tester for –
- Game Crashing/Freezing/Hanging –
When you start a game and at any point by doing anything causes your game to either freeze or crash, resulting in making the player going forward with the game impossible. This is the biggest game bug a developer should be worried about. These crashes are also known as CTD (Crash to Desktop) since no error message is displayed.
- Gameplay Glitches –
When you are trying to control your player using your controller but it does not seem to be working properly or entirely, that is a gameplay defect. Maybe all of a sudden, the jumping button isn’t working or you can’t open your menu, those glitches are really bothersome.
- Audio Issues –
An error related to starting or maintaining the sounds or music within the game events. If there is a song or sound missing or placing wrong audio effects or doing nothing at all that could be a deal-breaker with lots of gamers.
- Graphical Glitches –
When the game displays you a wrong image at any point of the game, it could show you an unintentional object or any character or some user interface like those demonic babies in The Sims 4, graphical glitches can be hilarious or downright creepy and developers should make them go away before launch.
- Text Problems –
Any kind of wrong, missing, unaligned, or mistyped text inside the game text boxes or codes being shown instead of texts are text-based issues and it can be annoying, especially in RPG games.
- Save Glitch Issue –
This is probably the biggest bothersome bug in any kind of game there is, just imagine putting hours upon hours to reach the final area of the game only for this glitch to corrupt your final save game file!
- Severe Bugging –
When something inside of the game that was supposed to happen in order to progress in the game does not happen, then that is a severe game glitch and it also makes a fool out of the player.
- Cosmetic Glitches –
When an area inside the game is giving you texture related or other graphical errors which can ruin the believability of the in-game story, then those are cosmetic bugs.
Why do bugs appear inside a game?
Search me mate! It is anyone’s guess, just like people are still trying to decipher the many meanings of Shakespeare’s plays, there could be myriad of reasons why bugs appear in video games but the most sensible ones are problem in coding, wrong programming, unintended logical mistakes in codes, human coding dysfunction, incompatibility with hardware, etc.
Look, the bigger the game the more chances it will have of being filled with bugs. All you can do with your big game is to put quality QA teams on it and hope that they at least find all the big and medium ones and as much of the small ones as they can.
How to find Bugs in video games?
Get professional and experienced QA testers so that they can offer you as much in-depth gaming experience as possible which will surely bring out any probable bug inside your game too. However, game testers apply these strategies to figure out the bugs inside your game –
- Exploratory Testing –
Game Testers (GTs) play the game as it is supposed to play while following every rule to find the obvious bugs.
- Rule Breaking Assessment –
GTs at this stage start breaking the game instructions to play and see what happens when they do everything except what the game instructs them to do.
- Unconventional Methods –
Same as the second method, only this time there are no rules involved, GTs do whatever they wish to do in order to test the seams of in-game physics and boundaries.
- Use everything –
GTs perform every in-game option at every stage for doing anything in order to bring out the flaws in game coding.
- Examination Runs –
GTs do minimum or maximum input playthroughs and do weird actions like trying to run inside the walls, handle an obstruction with unorthodox means, etc.
Why Should You Bring Down Common Bugs in Your Video Game before launch –
Well, why do chefs taste salt before they send out the meal to you? So, you can enjoy the food and you can feel that your money is well spent. You want to be successful in the video game industry as a developer, right? You want to be the next CAPCOM or Ubisoft, right? Then, make the gamers addicted to the games you offer and that can only happen when it is as flawless in its gaming fun as it can be. So you have to be sure that your work is as polished as it possibly can be before the big day.
Conclusion –
We have talked here about the types of bugs in video games that you should work upon. We have given you a focal point about what to be expecting when you are done with your game development. Make sure that there are no game bugs or else your hard work will not pay off the way you were expecting it to. Get a reputed QA team to debug your game today before launching it to your admirers. Good Luck.
