Automation approach for cocos-2dx based multi-player card game for web and mobile

Using automation to ensure reliability of a tricky card based game application is not a child's play, especially when the underlying engine is cocos-2dx, which is the world's no. 1 open-source and a cross-platform game development platform. This paper explores the challenges that can be faced while automating a game developed using cocos-2dx, such as dynamic rendering of game elements, overcoming the limitations in using automation tools like selenium in the absence of any locators to identify the visible or active elements to perform any operation. This paper further discusses the approach to bring efficient, generic and re-usable solution for these challenges while automating a multiplayer card game developed using cocos-2dx. This multi-layered approach spans across the following areas: 1) The mechanism for working and communicating with cocos-2dx web and native game client. 2) Approach for automating multiplayer game using FSM. 3) Automating the game play based on game rules which follows a heuristic approach. The benefit of this automation approach is that it makes the code 'device agnostic, which helps to run the same code against multiple devices of varying screen size and resolutions. This approach also makes the code robust, reducing any false failures since the interaction with the client is done via Javascript, which lot of UI automation tool still does not guarantee.