Your First Day as a Game Tester: A Hands-On QA Simulation

This is not another theory course about software testing — it is a hands-on simulation of your first day as a game tester.

From the moment you start, you are treated like a junior QA tester who just joined a small game studio. You are handed a real, unfinished game build — a top-down shooter that is rough and full of bugs — and you work through the same tasks a real tester faces on day one.

Across the day you will:

• Run a smoke test to confirm a fresh build is even worth testing.

• Retest a batch of bugs the developers claim they fixed, and decide for each one whether it is truly Fixed or should be Reopened.

• Read a feature specification and build your own test checklist from scratch.

• Hunt for bugs in the game's enemy feature and write clear, structured bug reports — with proper steps, expected vs actual results, severity, and priority.

  
  

After each task, you sit down with an AI teammate who reviews your work and pushes back, just like a real colleague would: a developer who argues about your reopened bugs, a QA lead who reviews your test plan, and a senior tester who critiques your reports.

By the end, you will not just understand what QA is — you will have done it. You will walk away with real work samples: a completed retest, your own test checklist, and a set of bug reports you can show in a junior QA interview.

A note on course length:

This course is built around doing, not watching. The video lessons are short and focused —  because the real learning happens in the hands-on work between them:

• 4 hands-on labs where you complete real QA tasks yourself

• 4 interactive Role Play conversations with AI teammates who review and challenge your work

  
  

Plan for roughly 3–5 hours of active, hands-on work overall. The videos brief you; the labs and Role Plays are where you actually become a tester.

No coding is required. If you can play a simple game and follow along, you can take this course. New to QA theory? This course is the hands-on companion to my foundational course, "QA: Become a Game tester 2026" — start there if you'd like to build the fundamentals (testing techniques, Jira, bug reports) before applying them here.