Greetings, fellow crusaders!
In this Dev Diary we’ll give a brief insight in how the CK2 QA team works and functions.
The team consists of myself (Servancour), PeterSkager, rageair and Leo Larsson. I’ve been here the longest and have been at Paradox for close to two years now, and so far it’s been a blast! We’re a close-knit team and work very well together, each and every one specializing in different types of gameplay.
As a team, we work very closely with the developers and attend all sorts of meetings to ensure that we stay up to date with the game. When you work with QA you need to know almost everything about the game, from overarching design to the smaller details of specific features. It’s challenging but also very rewarding.
While our primary responsibility may be to test the game, it’s not the only one. Many believe that the life of a QA only consists of reporting bugs, but it’s actually much more than that. We’re responsible for ensuring the overall quality of the product, by providing constant feedback, voice concerns where needed, comment on design and suggest improvements in order to make the game both better and more accessible!
Something we do every now and then when there’s new features to test is to simply play the game in order to get a feel for how to play with them. We usually test a variety of different scenarios, with varying start dates and setups, where we play for anything between a few years to several centuries. Sometimes we play for just a few hours, other times we have the campaigns going over the course of a few days, all while we gather feedback and impressions to the developers. This type of testing allows us to get a more accurate representation on how the game actually plays to find issues you wouldn’t find in a few minutes of playtime. Sometimes we even start using the same scenario just to see how far we can deviate from each other as we use very different playstyles. We believe that having many eyes on the same problem yield the best results.
We’re extremely passionate about the game. Each and every one of us here at the CK2 QA team has played the game for anything between a few hundred to several thousand hours and most of it has been purely for our own enjoyment. I myself play the game regularly outside of work and in my latest campaign I started off as Charlemagne himself, culture switched to German and created the Holy Roman Empire! I’m almost done with it though, with just the last hundred years or so left before the end date. My current ruler is Kaiserin Amalia “The Hammer”, ruling over Europe with an iron fist!
This passion also motivates us to not only ensure that the game performs well from a professional standpoint, but also from the perspective of a player. This causes us to often go above and beyond our ordinary tasks! We at QA has, on occasion, contributed with content to the game. Often to ensure that each and every part of the game feels like a quality experience. For example; we’ve created events to enhance certain aspects of the game (see the Sky Burial and Master Wrestling event chains) and even created art in the form of the Nomadic CoA’s introduced in Horse Lords.
I hope you gained some useful insight in how we approach CK2 from the QA team, and that we work hard to give you, the fans, a product that you deserve. Since we at QA love quality of life improvements, I’ll wrap this up by showing you the following screenshot of a previous feature we are extending somewhat:
In this Dev Diary we’ll give a brief insight in how the CK2 QA team works and functions.
The team consists of myself (Servancour), PeterSkager, rageair and Leo Larsson. I’ve been here the longest and have been at Paradox for close to two years now, and so far it’s been a blast! We’re a close-knit team and work very well together, each and every one specializing in different types of gameplay.
As a team, we work very closely with the developers and attend all sorts of meetings to ensure that we stay up to date with the game. When you work with QA you need to know almost everything about the game, from overarching design to the smaller details of specific features. It’s challenging but also very rewarding.
While our primary responsibility may be to test the game, it’s not the only one. Many believe that the life of a QA only consists of reporting bugs, but it’s actually much more than that. We’re responsible for ensuring the overall quality of the product, by providing constant feedback, voice concerns where needed, comment on design and suggest improvements in order to make the game both better and more accessible!
Something we do every now and then when there’s new features to test is to simply play the game in order to get a feel for how to play with them. We usually test a variety of different scenarios, with varying start dates and setups, where we play for anything between a few years to several centuries. Sometimes we play for just a few hours, other times we have the campaigns going over the course of a few days, all while we gather feedback and impressions to the developers. This type of testing allows us to get a more accurate representation on how the game actually plays to find issues you wouldn’t find in a few minutes of playtime. Sometimes we even start using the same scenario just to see how far we can deviate from each other as we use very different playstyles. We believe that having many eyes on the same problem yield the best results.
We’re extremely passionate about the game. Each and every one of us here at the CK2 QA team has played the game for anything between a few hundred to several thousand hours and most of it has been purely for our own enjoyment. I myself play the game regularly outside of work and in my latest campaign I started off as Charlemagne himself, culture switched to German and created the Holy Roman Empire! I’m almost done with it though, with just the last hundred years or so left before the end date. My current ruler is Kaiserin Amalia “The Hammer”, ruling over Europe with an iron fist!
This passion also motivates us to not only ensure that the game performs well from a professional standpoint, but also from the perspective of a player. This causes us to often go above and beyond our ordinary tasks! We at QA has, on occasion, contributed with content to the game. Often to ensure that each and every part of the game feels like a quality experience. For example; we’ve created events to enhance certain aspects of the game (see the Sky Burial and Master Wrestling event chains) and even created art in the form of the Nomadic CoA’s introduced in Horse Lords.
I hope you gained some useful insight in how we approach CK2 from the QA team, and that we work hard to give you, the fans, a product that you deserve. Since we at QA love quality of life improvements, I’ll wrap this up by showing you the following screenshot of a previous feature we are extending somewhat:
. I play a bunch of games, and PDS' strategy titles are amongst the best when it comes to quality on release these days (a far cry from life playing PDS games from HoI3 and earlier). Great to have some insight into how you do things, keep up the good work 
