Napoleon: Total War

Napoleon: Total War is a strategy game developed by The Creative Assembly and published by SEGA and was released in on 26 February 2010. I Worked on this title as QA Coordinator.

About the Game

Napoleon: Total War is the sixth stand-alone instalment in the Total War series. The game is set in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Players assume the role of Napoleon Bonaparte, or one of his major rivals, on a turn-based campaign map and engage in the subsequent battles in real-time. The game features three special campaigns that follow the general's career.

Napoleon contains four campaigns, two of which follow Napoleon's early military career. The first career event is the Italian campaign of 1796, while the second is the French invasion of Egypt in 1798. Both feature smaller, optional missions that help drive the story forward. The major French campaign, however, is the so-called "Mastery of Europe," which resembles the holistic modes of previous Total War games. Conversely, the "Campaigns of the Coalition" allows players to govern Great Britain, Russia, Prussia or the Austrian Empire and attempt to defeat Napoleonic France in Europe. Each major campaign requires players to obtain a certain number of territories to win.

An entirely new campaign, the Peninsular Campaign, was released 25 June 2010 as downloadable content. It was later released in retail as part of the Empire and Napoleon Total War - Game of the Year Edition compilation pack on 2 October 2010.

The Mac OS X version of the game, containing the Peninsular Campaign and additional unit packs, was ported by Feral Interactive and released for the Mac on 3 July 2013.

Skills and Experiences

Internally we referred to this project as an "Expand alone" as it was a stand-alone expansion to Empire: Total War, using the same engine. Work began on Napoleon along side the patches and DLC for Empire: Total War. I worked on this title throughout it's development.

One of the core ideas of this game was to make a more character driven narrative to the traditional "sandbox" Total War formula. Working very closely with the development team allowed me to produce detailed and structured test plans and unit tests based on their requirements, and the broader scope of the game.

A lot of lessons were learned from my previous experience on Empire: Total War, and as I started this project as QA Coordinator, I was in the position to implement testing procedures based on these. We collaborated with SEGA QA again, where The Creative Assembly's internal QA department tested daily builds, and the best build from each week was sent to SEGA for a week long testing phase. This meant we covered the game with long term and short term testing, to maintain coverage of both new check-ins and deeper gameplay testing.

I was responsible for the day to day task allocations for The Creative Assembly's internal QA team, and also coordinating and sending build to SEGA Europe's QA team. I developed the test plans for this project (large in-depth check-sheets and test cases) and ensured that these were completed and updated several times through the games testing period. I was also responsible for prioritising the bugs entered, and making sure the most important ones were communicated face-to-face with the correct developers (and finding who needed to fix them).

We also developed 4 DLCs for Napoleon: Total War. The Coalition Battle Pack, Imperial Eagle Pack, Heroes of the Napoleonic Wars, which all included new units for the game, and the previously mentioned Peninsular Campaign DLC, which was a much larger project and featured a whole new campaign map, set on the Iberian Peninsula. I worked as QA Coordinator on all of these DLCs, which were in test up until 22nd June 2010.