The 3DS version of FIFA 14 was its own beast — a stripped-down build designed specifically for handheld, with its own engine, its own feature set, and its own certification path through Nintendo’s lotcheck process. Testing it meant treating it as an entirely separate game from its console siblings, because in almost every technical sense, it was.
Back in the day, before studios started shipping bugs as features, I worked through the full certification process on the other side of the screen — testing games for Electronic Arts. Certification & compliance, which sounds dry but basically means being the last line of defense before a game hits the shelves: making sure it doesn’t crash, doesn’t cheat the rating system, and does exactly what it says on the box in every region it’s going to land in.
It wasn’t glamorous work, but it gave me something most designers never get: a really intimate understanding of how games break, and why. Every bug report I filed was a small lesson in the gap between intention and execution — which, turns out, is pretty much what design is about too.
