Operating Regions
There are 4 stages/states that a game may be in or have to go through during the time period of testing.
Pre-game - The is the stage where the player is about to double click on the game or about to insert the disk to the game. The reason for this stage to be important is that the player/user could have changed some settings that may cause the game to not start properly or not start at all.
Game-Start - The is the part where the loading screen plays with the companies' logo and animation plays and all the cinematics play with it. This stage can also be the menu screen. This also includes loading screens after press "Start". This is probably just as important as Pre-game because if the player can not even access the menu that means the game has not started up properly and that they can not start the actual game. So when problems occur during this stage, it is a high priority to fix it.
In-Game - This stage covers all of the things after the loading screen. This is where the user turns into a player and actually starts playing and interacting with the features and elements of the game. This is the stage where most testing happens as there will be much more game times then pre-game, game-start stage. The QA team will be focusing this part the most as most of the bugs will happen here. Some functions can only be interacted with once forcing the tester to restart the level to attempt to reproduce the bug but some bugs can be repeated throughout the entire game play.
Post-game - This stage is when the player exits the game, where they save and quit. Back then before auto-save this would be the save screen where you save your progress almost every 10 minutes or you might lose your progress whilst playing. This infuriated many people as majority of gamers are not smart enough to save their game regularly. That is why they introduced auto-save as losing out on game-play does actually ruin the game-play in a sense that the player has to go back and do everything all over again and most likely get another outcome than the one they had before. Also having to save the game every so often ruined the game-play in a way that you have to pause the game, save then resume. So this section is just as important as game-start as saving the progress of the game is very important as an aspect of keeping the game-play immersive.
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