Grumpy Gamer

I first created TesterTron3000 during Thimbleweed Park (hence the name). It was a simple automated tester that randomly clicked on the screen. It couldn’t play the game because it has no knowledge of inventory or puzzles. It did find the odd errors, but was of little real value.

Fast forward to the futuristic year of 2025 and I’m working on Death by Scrolling and need a new automated game play tester.

Death by Scrolling, not being an adventure game, comes along and I need a whole new program to test with, but I like the name so I keep that.

TesterTron3000 is pretty simple, it just runs through the level, looks for power-ups and if its health is low, it looks for hearts. It’s not rocket science. I could make it a lot smarter, but what I really need is tool that stress tests the game so smarts of low on the list.

I can leave it running overnight and it plays thousands of levels and in the morning I see if any errors occurred or if there are memory leaks.

None so far.

Its been a great tool for consoles because we can only do limited testing before sending it to outside testers due to limited dev kits¹, so running TesterTron3000 on it for 24 hours is good piece of mind.

There are little animation glitches because it’s not running through the normal controller code and I’ve spotted some missing sfx.

TesterTron3000 is written 100% in Dinky and only about 100 lines of code.

I might ship it with the final game as an attract mode, but it’s kind of buggy, has bad path finding, and really stupid so I worry players would fixate on what it’s not doing right. It’s not a tool for playing the game with any degree is skill, it’s a stress tester and a dev tool.

But, it’s fun to watch.

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