Introduction

After spending 14 months at Dotemu, working on 3 different releases, I became eager to work on a single project with a larger scope and range. Sloclap was included in my personal list of French studios I had high interest in working at, as were Bandai Namco and Ubisoft. Luckily for me, right as I were considering my exit from Dotemu, a QA Testing job listing appeared. Throughout this month of applications, both Sloclap and another studio, ZDT (ZeDrimeTim), offered me a QA Testing position. My final choice was Sloclap, as REMATCH was a more attractive and ambitious project than ZDT’s debut game appeared to me.

I started my contract on February 12th, 2024, joining a three-people QA department, led by Virgile Lions, and composed with Benjamin Marie as an Associate Lead and Arthur Desesquelles as the other QA Tester.

Pitch

Control one player on your team and compete in fast-paced 5v5 matches from an immersive third-person perspective. Team up with your friends and join the action.

Project’s Introduction

From February 2024, I’ve been fully focused on Rematch. As I started, the project had finished the pre-production, working towards the mid-Alpha Milestone. At that time, Rematch was much ahead its announcement and new features would be implemented, and undergo through several tests and iterations.

During my first month at Sloclap, I familiarized myself with the project as well as the company’s tools and processes. My understanding on the latter went pretty fast, and I’ve started reporting bugs, following templates, deploying servers, attending weekly meetings and feature reviews, managing test kits and builds as well as communicating with our outsourced testers from my very first week.

On the other hand, it took me the entire month to comprehend the project as a whole, as I had to learn about the game’s lingo, technical terms, the variety of features and their state of implementation, the full list of bugs as well as some other important information that would allow me to work with confidently on the project.

Production

Occasionally throughout the Production, I were assigned features that didn’t make it to the final version we’re releasing on June 19th.
For the rest, here’s a definitive list of all features I was the main Point of Contact, either at some point or entirely from mid-February 2024 to basically the game’s release/the end of my contract in Summer 2025:

Customisation & Monetization

• Character Customisation
• Battle Pass
• Store

Match Flow

• Match Start
• Finishers/Celebrations
• Goal Replay
• Victory Moods
• Spectator Mode

Misc.

• Radar
• Data Tracking (Player Stats)
• Localisation
• Compliance Sony
• Support for Marketing Trailers
• Internal Playtests Organisation

For most of these features, I took care of redacting & updating Test Plans, attending weekly meetings, reporting most of the related tickets, preparing the corresponding Jira filters and dashboards and sharing frequent reports.

Highlights

Here are a few of my performed tasks which particularly appreciated as they helped either the QA department or the project’s production in itself:

Customisation/Monetization:

• Created from scratch a Test Plan which, throughout Production and during Live Service, lists all produced Items, orders them by their emplacement in-game (Default Inventory, Store, Battle Pass, Limited/Special Editions), and generates full character customisations for Testers.
  
  The goal of this Test Plan was to 1. track which items need to be tested, which weren’t ready yet 2. help checking if the items are indeed located where they need to be 3. gain time by not having to manually write down which items are checked 4. and most importantly, test several different customisation combinations to potentially flag a larger amount of bugs.
  
• Setup an Online Environment for tests in which progression & rewards are exponentially increased, in order to facilitate testing various interfaces and menus related to these, without needing access to debug, which could partially impair our tests results.

Compliance:

• Created from scratch a Test Plan containing all TRCs & Test Cases and their descriptions, kept it updated after each new version release by Sony,

Localisation:

• Listed each week which remaining Text Strings
• Fully handled the organisation, familiarisation & communication with the Localisation QA teams.

Customer Support:

• Prepared the first versions of Bug Reporting Forms, which were used during our Beta 1 & Consoles Tech Test. It gathered a total of 920 answers with at least 1K bugs. I’ve personally reviewed and identified 400+ of these. This helped us identifying what were the final bugfixes we absolutely need for the game’s release.

Overall Production:

• For about 6 Sprints and the Mid-Beta Milestone
• For the Alpha & Beta Milestones, I’ve personally reported each day the teams’ progression regarding stabilisation & bugfixes.
• Throughout Production, I’ve reported each week the teams’ progression for each of my assigned features.
• Organised more than 70 internal Playtests (build & server deployment, assigning to teams, gathered bugs’ recordings and logs, recorded gameplay for marketing.

Betas & Playtests

I’ve also helped on the organisation and preparation for each of our Load Tests, as well as our following Previews and Betas.
Not only did they allow us to properly test our servers and online features under an increasing amount of players one test after the other, it also was of great use for our own Marketing.

We began with four confidential Load Tests which lasted about three hours each. Our top CCU reached 852, 2702, 6675 and finally 9830 players, which was quite on par with the 1k-2.5k-5k-10k goals we’ve set ourselves.
As we’ve noticed a lot of engagement in the game from our playtesters, we’ve ended up promoting the last one of these just to reach more easily the 10k headcount, as well as acquire more potentials fans of the game, as well as feedbacks. I believe this worked pretty efficiently, as many people wanted to get access to our First Preview/Influencers Beta on April 11th.

For this playtest, all previous Playtesters as well as a selection of Influencers and Content Creators were allowed to play Rematch for an entire weekend, right before our very first Closed Beta.
During this Preview, the numbers of total players remained almost identical as for the 4th Load Test, but what was truly an accomplishment for us was the promotion the game received from Content Creators all around the world.

These livestreams propelled the game’s notoriety and it was later seen during the 1st Beta, which cumulated 880k+ Steam players for over 1.3M signups around mid-April.
This first Beta’s success made our community craving for a second Beta, which was made available at the very end of May.
Even though Crossplay was not available during these Betas, or at launch, we managed to release a version for all of our platforms, Steam, PC Game Pass, Xbox Series and PlayStation 5.
Even with a 50k players limit for the Microsoft environments, we reached spectacular player counts.

Conclusion

6 days after its Release Day, Rematch reached 3 million unique players and sold 1.25m copies. As I’m writing these words, its Metacritic note is 74.5 with 65 reviews, and has a 77% positive score off 20k Steam reviews.
I finished my contract by making sure all of my tickets were regressed, all of my test plans up to date with previsional test cases for upcoming features, and took the time to prepare wiki pages to help the QA team and the rest of the Rematch team for everything related to my tasks and features.