This should now be the complete set of tests. It should provide full coverage for all the game logic and enable testing the critical path and all the side quests without the need to actually play through the game. Playtesting can then focus on pacing and fun factor. There’s still some work to do on the map tests. Everything on the menu after the map tests is done.
It’s 2025 and Pax Britannia is back in active development. Most of the codebase is about 11 years old at this point. But, it was written in a fairly modular way. The first task is stitching it all together. The easiest way to do that without breaking anything was to make a virtual devkit. The target platform has 128K of program (the game and data). The devkit includes an additional 64K of space for a monitor and test routines.
At present the world map, town maps, encounter maps, font, tile and audio tests are working. It’s also possible to export the game package. Exiting from the monitor starts the game, and you can return to the monitor by pressing the NMI (non-maskable interrupt) button or quitting the game.
The monitor uses the actual code from the game to print to the screen, display tiles, play music and so on, which means everything can be tested in situ. Besides all the code, it was also necessary to import all the data. The layout has changed slightly to reflect the requirements of the code. From bank 0 to 7, it’s now:
audio|2D tiles|game logic|3D tiles|world map|framebuffer|mini maps|dialogueY