I love video games and the prospect of making a career out of them has always been a dream that I believed too good to be true. However, the game industry has been on the rise for decades and increasingly proves to be a real career choice with the added benefit that even a small team can produce something that stands out. With this dream in mind, I’ve read the following article on how to get started in the game industry with advice and interviews from current game developers.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/20/how-to-get-into-the-games-industry-an-insiders-guide

The first question asked to the panel is “What is the best way to start making game?” To which many emphasized the importance of learning the basics of coding. While some game development tools allow you to get started with little coding knowledge, its unavoidable that you eventually learn a programming language or two, C++ is recommended specifically. Game developments tools such as unity, RPG maker, and game maker studio help significantly with transferable concepts of what goes into making a game.

Another question was “If someone is looking to set up a small studio themselves – what advice would you give them?” A few panelists strongly advised not starting a studio early on and that a better choice would be getting experience in an already established studio before gaining the confidence to branch off on your own. However, if you were to start a studio you absolutely need a great programmer as well as an artist. Also it is very important that you have a team member who knows the business of the industry. Byron Atkinson-Jones shares that “the making of the game, that’s actually the easiest part. Managing things like business finances, making sure you can all eat regularly, marketing, PR, legal stuff, QA and selling the game once it’s done are the hardest.”

The next question asked was “Are there any key skills that people should have or things they should know that aren’t obvious or aren’t taught on design/coding courses?” To which many of the panelists stressed the importance of communication within a team. Learning to be a nice person while being open to criticism for the sake of the project are invaluable traits that cannot be taught in schools. You could be very skilled and experienced but if you don’t get along with group members and refuse to communicate effectively, your project will suffer greatly.

The last question ill go over in this post is “Is a degree in computer games programming or design a necessity?” The short answer from most of the panelists is no, you can go a long way with passion and devotion to video games as long as you have the portfolio to back it up. Aj Grand-Scrutton expresses that “a degree is effectively gravy compared to an actual portfolio” emphasizing that real experience dominates over just having a degree.

From the blog CS@Worcester – CS Mikes Way by CSmikesway and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

My teammate and I are currently working on a Blackjack card game, which we will present to our class during finals week. I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to become more familiar with Angular and TypeScript for this project, and I believe I am starting to make some good progress. For instance, I have figured out how to build a card deck, shuffle it, and display images of these cards to the user.

There is a great online instructor named Mosh Hamedani with a series of tutorial videos for both Angular and TypeScript. I’ve already watched several of his videos and found them extremely useful and informative. The instructor has a personal blog as well. I would like to discuss one of his blog entries in particular, entitled Angular 4 in 20 minutes.

First, a disclaimer. I certainly did not learn Angular in 20 minutes, but Mosh’s insight and clear explanations are helping me understand Angular and TypeScript concepts more than any other tutorial I’ve tried so far. 

Mosh’s blog entry is a synopsis of one of his free tutorial videos, which is approximately two hours long. I’ve watched the entire video twice already and I believe it is definitely worthwhile to anyone who is trying to learn Angular and TypeScript. Here are a few important points that Mosh brings up in his video synopsis:

He explains that Angular is a framework for building applications in HTML, CSS and TypeScript/JavaScript. He also answers the question of why a developer would want to use Angular rather than other alternative methods. I have to agree with Mosh here that learning TypeScript with the Angular Framework seems a whole lot easier than, as he puts it, “vanilla JavaScript.” I believe this is due to the “IntelliSense” offered within Angular and TypeScript which is currently unavailable in JavaScript alone. When comparing TypeScript code side by side with JavaScript, in my opinion, the former is much easier to understand than the latter.

Mosh also goes through a step-by-step process on how to install everything needed to run the Angular framework, including how to create a new application project from the terminal. Next, he uses MS Visual Studio to go through the project layout and explains every single file that was created, including their functions and purposes. He then demonstrates how to generate new components within the project and how to connect them with the main application module.

The free video posted in Mosh’s synopsis blog entry is part of a 30+ hour long Udemy course video compilation that typically costs at least $200. Fortunately, there is a great “Black Friday” sale going on where I was able to purchase this entire course for just ten dollars. I feel I am making great progress in learning Angular and TypeScript; I honestly believe it would have not been possible without his videos and blogs. I am certain I will continue to reference Mosh’s insightful blog entries and tutorial videos, and apply what I’ve learned from him during my professional career.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Jason Knowles by Jason Knowles and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Not just another CS blog by osworup007 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Not just another CS blog by osworup007 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Since we (Me and Dan) are working as a team to build a web app (Remote Team Builder) for our final project in 343 class, I thought to learn how to test web apps would be essential. So, this week I read an article on Software Testing Help site, which was a guide about testing web applications.

As per the author, these are the most common web testing checklists:

1) Functionality Testing

Test for all the links in web pages, database connection, forms used for submitting or getting information from user in the web pages, Cookie testing etc.

Cookies Testing: Test the application by enabling or disabling the cookies in your browser options. Test if the cookies are encrypted before writing to user machine. If you are testing the session cookies check for login sessions and user stats after session ends.

Validate your HTML/CSS: If you are optimizing your site for Search engines then HTML/CSS validation is the most important one. Mainly validate the site for HTML syntax errors. Check if the site is crawlable to different search engines.

Database testing: Check for data integrity and errors while you edit, delete, modify the forms or do any DB related functionality.

2) Usability testing

Test for navigation: Navigation means how an user surfs the web pages, different controls like buttons, boxes or how the user uses the links on the pages to surf different pages.

Content checking: Check for spelling errors. Usage of dark colours annoys the users and should not be used in the site theme. You can follow some standard colours that are used for web page and content building.

3) Interface testing

Check if all the interactions between these servers are executed and errors are handled properly. If database or web server returns any error message for any query by application server then application server should catch and display these error messages appropriately to the users. Check what happens if user interrupts any transaction in-between? Check what happens if connection to the web server is reset in between?

4) Compatibility testing

Compatibility of your website is a very important testing aspect. See which compatibility test to be executed such as Browser compatibility, Operating system compatibility, Mobile browsing, Printing options.

5) Performance testing

Web Load Testing:  You need to test if many users are accessing or requesting the same page. Can system sustain in peak load times? Site should handle many simultaneous user requests, large input data from users, simultaneous connection to DB, heavy load on specific pages etc.

Web Stress Testing: Web stress testing is performed to break the site by giving stress and its checked as how the system reacts to stress and how it recovers from crashes. Stress is generally given on input fields, login and sign up areas.

6) Security testing

Following are some of the test cases for web security testing:

• Test by pasting internal URL directly onto the browser address bar without login. Internal pages should not open.
• If you are logged in using username and password and browsing internal pages then try changing URL options directly. I.e. If you are checking some publisher site statistics with publisher site ID= 123. Try directly changing the URL site ID parameter to different site ID which is not related to the logged in user. Access should be denied for this user to view others stats.
• Try some invalid inputs in input fields like login username, password, input text boxes etc. Check the systems reaction on all invalid inputs.
• Web directories or files should not be accessible directly unless they are given download option.
• Test the CAPTCHA for automates script logins.
• Test if SSL is used for security measures. If used proper message should get displayed when user switch from non-secure http:// pages to secure https:// pages and vice versa.
• All transactions, error messages, security breach attempts should get logged in log files somewhere on the web server.

Although it was a quite a lengthy article, I enjoyed reading it. We may not get time to test every aspect of our web app, but I will definitely keep on eye on the security aspects. In our web app we have a login in screen for the members of a team. I will test the method as suggested in the article to browse internal pages then try changing URL options directly. I think it would be a fun to include CAPTCHA security measures to prevent automates script logins.

Source: http://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/web-application-testing/

From the blog CS@Worcester – Not just another CS blog by osworup007 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.