Game Rules and Programming

All Xbox 360 games have some sort of graphics, geometry, objects, characters and so on, but these things don't just float around for no reason. There is a set of rules that govern how these objects interact, things such as: bullet damage, how many lives you have, game objective, how a player interacts with the geometry, and the list goes on. What you have to anticipate is that these rules can be followed but still will result in no further progress in the game. Testers have to make sure there is no possible way to get stuck and unable to make any further (objective) progress.

Examples and What to Look for

Lets take the destroy your own key dilemma: say you are playing a Xbox 360 adventure game. You need a key in order to advance to the next part of the dungeon or level, so you find the key, pick it up and drop it off a bridge or into a fire or something. Making it impossible to make any further progress and not telling the player that he cannot finish the said objective. The rules in the game allow the player to destroy the key and not progress, this is plain wrong (unless its an old PC adventure game, where you could walk around for hours not realizing that you had to restart the game and try again). Problems like this have to be realized and configured for a better play experience.

Broken Game rules can stop progress in the game but also in less serious cases it can just screw with seemingly unimportant parts of the game. Small unanticipated glitches might be found that developers can easily overlook because the instances they happen are so rare. To look at an example, what if every time you had 4 grenades and 32 bullets in your gun when you tried to throw your grenade you would drop your weapon. This is an obscure event that won't trouble many players but still can be considered a bug. A lot of the times tester can't even catch these small insignificant problems, but taking your playable character into as many peculiar situations as possible will increase the chance of finding these bugs. These problems still face Xbox 360 games and are often solved by releasing demos or betas.