End-to-End Testing of Unity Games and Apps

The client

A couple of years ago we started working with a company in their New Concepts team as testers and app developers. Our client was creating simple clean apps, testing a lot of new ideas that had to be delivered fast.

Our solution

The incredible agility of Unity for development

After trying out a few options, including some web frameworks, we decided to develop all our apps in Unity. It has support for any platform that we could ever need and it’s excellent for fast prototyping, with incredible graphics on every platform and with an abundance of ready-made artworks, scripts, plugins, and solutions available on their Asset Store.

The struggles of test automation using Appium and image recognition

While Unity allowed us to be very productive on the development side, we were again struggling on the testing side.

We had to deal with a lot of apps that still required a lot of testing. Most of these apps also had to work together as part of a system, and we often found ourselves trying to figure out ways to deploy and run some automated checks on our environment automatically.

While the apps were relatively simple and would have been the perfect candidate for simple automated checks with Appium (which works on Android, iOS, and even Windows nowadays), Unity didn’t have a solution for running these types of system-level / UI driven tests on real devices.

Finding a solution for UI driven test automation in Unity

While searching for a solution for these two problems, Rasmus Selsmark, a fellow tester who works at Unity in Helsinki, told us about this hack-day project that provides one possible option for running Appium tests against Unity games and getting feedback from Unity about the objects on the screen via the Debug.Log() functionality – so essentially by injecting information about specific objects in the device logs (logcat on Android or syslog on iOS), from where they can then be parsed and used inside the Appium tests.

We tried it out and then decided to try to implement something similar using a TCP socket running from the Unity game that can listen to commands sent from the tests. And so we created AltTester® Unity SDK.