Nexon Games Builds an Auto-Play Test Tool That Never Stops
The tool shows how a console game studio solved the combinatorial explosion of graphics settings and closed-platform constraints by embedding a bot that keeps testing even when perfect reproduction fails.
Key Facts
- Nexon Games engine programmer Kang Jang-hoon presented the M1 APT (Auto Play Test) tool at NDC26, built for The First Descendant to automate performance testing across PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
- The tool runs continuously on console hardware without external automation tools, using a four-pipeline system for pathfinding, combat, mission detection, and crash recovery.
- The core design philosophy prioritizes uninterrupted data collection over perfect reproducibility, with a crash-detection loop that restarts the bot automatically.
- The combat system caches only the five nearest enemies to avoid frame drops, and the pathfinding system includes a teleportation fallback.
Reporting from 1 source: 4Gamer.net.
At NDC26, Nexon Games engine programmer Kang Jang-hoon presented M1 APT, an automated test tool for The First Descendant. Designed to run continuously on console hardware without external automation tools, it uses a four-pipeline system for pathfinding, combat, mission detection, and crash recovery, prioritizing uninterrupted data collection over perfect reproducibility.
Kang Jang-hoon, an engine programmer at Nexon Games' Magnum Studio, presented the M1 APT (Auto Play Test) tool at NDC26. The tool was built for The First Descendant to automate performance testing across PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC-about 30 graphics-option combinations per build. Console platforms do not allow external automation tools, so the bot had to be embedded inside the packaged game itself.
The core design philosophy was to prioritize tests that never stop over tests that are perfectly reproducible. Four pipelines support that goal: a three-stage pathfinding fallback that ends in teleportation, a combat system that caches only the five nearest enemies to avoid frame drops, Levenshtein-distance-based mission-type matching to catch typos, and a crash-detection loop that restarts the bot automatically. Kang said the idea was to let the system run tests while he focused on his main work.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.