The Process of Testing the Game + Bugs Showcase + Pathfinding + Parafolks Sitting at Tables (Patreon)

Hello everyone,

Charlotte, Richard and Alejandro here with today’s Patreon post! Charlotte will show you a peek at how gameplay features are tested followed by a showcase of a few special bugs. Richard will talk about pathfinding with staircases, finishing with Alejandro who will go into chair animations and item slots!

Quality Assurance Testing Process + Bug Showcase

Happy Valentine’s Day! ❣️Today I will give you guys a look behind the scenes at my process with how I test certain features using checklists.

Here’s how the process goes: Alex and Jérémie will let me know what feature needs to be tested. I’ll take a look at the feature and any documentation available and from it, I will create a testing checklist– essentially a list filled with the gameplay system’s basic functions that I will need to test one by one.

Here’s an example of a checklist I made last year for premade houses that you can place on empty lots! I have to balance it to make sure there are enough points that cover the basics but also don’t get too specific in order to be efficient with my time.

Here’s a closer look at a part of the checklist.

Once the checklist is done, I’ll pass it over to the programmer in charge of the feature to make sure everything is good to go. After I get the OK from the programmer, I’ll start testing! This means I go through each one of the points to see if it succeeds or fails.

 Here’s the filled version of the previous checklist. As you can see, some stuff Failed, and so a bug was logged! 

Having these checklists allows me to have a documented test of the gameplay feature to see what worked and what didn’t, and I can always return to it to see what was tested previously. The checklists also allow me to retest them again in the future, with some tweaks if features were added or changed.

Of course, through all of my testing, bugs are found! As of the writing of this post, I have entered a grand total of 778 bugs (with 537 of those being fixed). I’ve picked a few candidates from that large pile for a little showcase.

Hrm, not sure you’re supposed to sleep like that…

My Para can take you on a magical carpet ride and🎵 show you the world 🎶…

When you’re struggling to choose between sitting on the couch or getting a snack…

Roses are red and… doors are too?

But of course, all bugs must be reported no matter how goofy or “ordinary” they look, because here at Paralives, we love all bugs ♥️  (Okay well, maybe the programmers might not like them as much as I do, hahaha). Here’s to hoping your Valentine’s Day is filled with fewer bugs than mine!

Pathfinding Stairs Exceptions

Hey, Richard here for a quick addition to pathfinding. I have been working on pathfinding and one of the changes I made was to not allow babies to use stairs. This system will also allow us, in the future, to enable/disable paths in pools or have reserved/locked doors. 

 The baby can crawl but since they can’t take the stairs, it was not possible for them to get upstairs. Don’t worry, I will be working on making a parent take the baby upstairs. 

Chair Slots and Item Slots

Hey! Alejandro here, I have been working on the chair slots and item slots. That means, whenever you place a chair on a table or an item on a counter, it can be rotated and placed in a specific position.

This will link the chair with the table and the Computer and vice-versa.

With this, we can create connections between the item on the table and the chair, for actions like being on the computer. You will still be able to place the items in any position or rotation by disabling snapping with the alt-key.

This connection also makes it so chairs will automatically follow when moving a table in the build mode.. There is also no limit on the amount of chair slots a table can have.

For when you invite all your friends to the table. 

With this, we also worked on the sitting animation for chairs at tables. We had to modify our system to support entering a chair from different sides and also exiting. We can sit directly from the front of a chair, but also from each side of it. 

 My Para sitting on and getting up from a chair from the right side (It was more complex to achieve than it looks)

We are still working on tweaking the numbers to get a smooth transition between all the steps required to sit on a chair, surprisingly there are a lot of numbers a developer can tweak for sitting on a chair.

This concludes today’s Patreon post!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Edit - May 1, 2025: This post is now public, feel free to share it!