Practical automation for mobile game teams — things you can start today
Mobile game automation has a reputation for being difficult, and it is. Games are nondeterministic, levels are random, and the sheer complexity of what a human tester evaluates in a single glance feels impossible to capture in a script. Most teams never start because they're waiting for the perfect framework or the perfect oracle.
This talk argues that you don't need either. Drawing on over ten years of hands-on mobile game QA, I walk through seven practical "quick wins" that have consistently worked for me across projects: level loading checks, debug cheats for test setup, shop and IAP sanity scans, FTUE automation, account progress verification, AI-assisted test maintenance, and using automation as a live ops monitoring layer.
The thread connecting all seven is the concept of partial oracles: targeted checks that verify something meaningful without trying to verify everything. A score of zero after a level loads doesn't tell you the level is fun — but it tells you no structures collapsed and no matches fired prematurely. That's already more than you knew before.
Each example is tool-agnostic, grounded in real projects, and designed to deliver value from day one. The talk is aimed at anyone working on a mobile game who wants to move from zero automation to something genuinely useful — without spending months on framework design first.