One of the most significant challenges in producing large works of text-driven multimedia is the work of testing. There’s a few basic reasons for that:
- Games are designed in-flight, through iterative and playful processes, and so a pre-written set of test plans or user stories will invariably need further labor to keep pace with design.
- Testing is easy to ignore in the context of deadlines.
- Understanding and visualizing any narrative as a complex tree or directed acyclic graph, rather than a piece of “static” fiction which moves from A-Z (or א to ת, if you prefer), is extremely difficult. If this sounds hyperbolic, ask literally anyone who’s ever contracted with a VC-funded interactive televisual or multimedia startup.
- Testing is subjectively different from programming in that nothing, not even the compiler, tells us whether we did it right. There’s no model, even in senior software engineering, which tells you whether your tests a