A Gearbox Plugin for Codeless Automated Tests | Unreal Fest 2023

The ever-increasing ambitions of the AAA videogame industry come with exploding design complexity, and keeping quality in check requires ever more ingenuity. That’s why Gearbox created Polaris, an Unreal Engine 5 plugin for automating tests, empowering the people who make the game with user-friendly QA tools so they can create tests that will live throughout the development process. Polaris enables QA professionals, designers, artists or developers to simulate in-game behavior via automated agents. By running these tests periodically in build pipelines, the team can keep tabs on advancement and regressions over the entire development process. Polaris is fully integrated within the Unreal Engine ecosystem and project-agnostic. It has a friendly Slate-based GUI and relies on the FTEST system. It integrates well with build systems, including console builds. These automated agents have already demonstrated that their potential extends beyond QA. We believe they also constitute a strong basis for future applications including in-game data generation, and reinforcement learning (RL)-based agents able to extend the coverage of tests. In fact, the tool is being developed with these future features in mind. We’re excited to bring you sessions from Unreal Fest 2023, available to watch on demand: