Week 14 — Nov 24 — Ex 10: Test & Iterate

Exercise: Ex 10 — Test & Iterate. A test build, three playtests, and one fix implemented live in class.

Feeds: directly into the Game Build milestone next week (Wk 15) — the last exercise-to-milestone handoff of the semester.

Lecture topics, expanded

PlaytestLogger session logging. The helper library's PlaytestLogger writes timestamped session events to a local log file — deaths, level completions, menu opens — without a student needing to build any telemetry themselves. The lecture point: a log is only useful if it captures moments, not just states, so students should log events ("player died") rather than continuous values ("player health") unless they specifically need a graph of the latter.

Unity Profiler and bug triage. A first, brief look at the Profiler window — CPU/GPU spikes, GC allocations — mainly to teach students to recognize "my game is laggy" as a diagnosable problem rather than something to shrug at. Bug triage as a skill: reproduce it, isolate the smallest scene that still shows it, only then open the script.

Build prep fundamentals. Player Settings sanity checks (company/product name, icon, resolution defaults) and a first test build to confirm the project actually builds outside the editor — a surprising number of "finished" projects have never once been built as a standalone player before the final week, which is the worst time to discover a build-only bug.

Connecting it to the milestone

This is the week testing is supposed to change the game, not just document it: three playtests, three sets of notes, one fix implemented live means students walk into the Game Build milestone having already iterated once on real feedback rather than their own assumptions. Worth being explicit that "one fix implemented live" is graded as part of Implementation, same rubric shape as every other exercise — a playtest log with no resulting change doesn't satisfy it.