Game Health - A deep dive into QA and how YOU can help

Last week we revealed that 1.0 will be coming in 2026, and we also touched upon a production pivot that has us focusing more on perfecting the current in-game features and offering players an optimized and polished gameplay experience.

September will bring a health focused update, similar to our Reinforcement update last November where we highly prioritize the health of the game over adding new features to NMRiH2. Game health is a mixture of optimization — the art of delivering the highest quality game in the smallest possible package — and polishing of the gameplay experience by removing bugs and confusing or unintended issues.

This first deep dive is all about our QA team, the work they’ve put into the game over the past 10 months to get the game to where it is today, and our ambitious polishing objectives for 1.0 next year. Every Support ticket and crash report is a key component to game health, and offers a tremendous amount of help to our relatively small QA Team.

What’s QA?

Every Quality Assurance (QA) team at every development studio works differently, but they all generally have the same mission: supporting the team in delivering the best possible product to its players. At Torn Banner, our QA team wears many hats, which include but are not limited to:

• Finding as many bugs as possible in as many iterations of each upcoming feature and update as possible.

• Troubleshooting those bugs and finding the root cause, then giving as much information as possible to the correct developer to fix the issue.

• Working with our Community team to track customer support tickets, feedback on platforms with Twitter, Reddit, and Discord, and triage and troubleshoot issues as they come up.

• Entrench themselves within different development groups and support feature development as it happens

• Support and run internal and external playtests every week

• Generate game analytics reports & QA reports

“We have a lot to do as a QA team at Torn Banner, which can be a perk of the job! For me, being a liaison to every different department and developer at the studio is why I enjoy games testing so much. It also means our team has a responsibility to find bugs and feedback in each area of the game; in one day we might need to hunt down an objective bug blocking our next map, places you can get stuck in our live maps, and test a new weapon, new customizations, and new progression features. It’s a lot to juggle!”

—TornSheep, QA Tester

The Art of Triage

Torn Banner is a small studio, with a relatively small QA team, and that makes managing a large list of tasks difficult, No More Room in Hell 2 being an 8 player game makes everything more complicated, because so much testing has to be done in groups. We cannot be everywhere at once, and that makes triaging issues the most important part of the job.

We have to take a few things into account:

• How bad is a bug if it happens (total blocker, there are workarounds, just a blemish)

• How often a bug happens (every single game, some players might see it, you really have to look for it)

• Balancing our time between live bugs and bugs in upcoming features

With all of the factors above bugs are categorized as either minor, moderate, or blocker/major severity.

“Severity is our shorthand to assess: “how bad is this bug going to be for a player?” As a QA team it’s important for us to