Never be your own tester

[AndyN]

Or allow anyone who has to live with you, work with you or even go to the pub with you be your tester either.

Just had a glaring problem with Autofrag pointed out to me (in a review <sob>) which took me all of three minutes to fix. I was clearly too close to the game to see things objectively and friends who tested were too polite.

If anyones pondering about asking for gameplay feedback on this forum, I would say YES, do it! You can't trust the weasels who know you to actually be honest with you about things that suck in case you take it badly and rip them a new one. Ask for feedback on forums like this and your getting the most informed and honest comments you're likely to get without paying for them.

I relied on the feedback of friends, colleagues and family and now I'm both the winner and loser in a one man arse kicking contest.

[Chaster]

Or allow anyone who has to live with you, work with you or even go to the pub with you be your tester either.

Just had a glaring problem with Autofrag pointed out to me (in a review <sob>) which took me all of three minutes to fix. I was clearly too close to the game to see things objectively and friends who tested were too polite.

If anyones pondering about asking for gameplay feedback on this forum, I would say YES, do it! You can't trust the weasels who know you to actually be honest with you about things that suck in case you take it badly and rip them a new one. Ask for feedback on forums like this and your getting the most informed and honest comments you're likely to get without paying for them.

I relied on the feedback of friends, colleagues and family and now I'm both the winner and loser in a one man arse kicking contest.

The question is... Are you smart enough to LISTEN to the feedback given? Heh heh... (just reminiscing about the recent blowout regarding feedback from Svero about Roulette's game...)

:D

[AndyN]

Oh yeah, I'm smart enough to listen. :) Now I am anyway, just often too dumb to ask :/

I have in the past asked for people's feedback (friends, colleagues, etc) and been pissed because they didn't just tell me how clever I am. I've matured now. A bit.

I think that's sometimes the problem with asking for feedback of anyone, make sure you're actually after a critique and not just a pat on the back. If you want that you should lie face down in a field of cows.

[gpetersz]

Don't flame me, it is only an idea.
Shouldn't we form some kind of testing community?
Or we could form pairs, everybody chooses the one she/he doesn't like at all and want to test the sh*t out of the given game. (okay, I was only joking. Hatred is not a must)

I know it is another burden, or another task to do each day, but regarding the fact that most indies work alone, and probably work on only one project at a time and work for months on that one, one can probably find 1-2 weeks to get busy with somebody elses game.

In my experience, (I work as a freelance artist and my mainstream of income is from ORACLE database developing) sometimes I debug (if I realize the bug) for an hour, then one other guy comes over, looks on my screen and laughs: "hey man, you should initialize that variable before entering that loop again, then come and get a coffee" or "hey, you again copy pasted some code and this variable has not any value in this branch, then come and have a lunch". So somebody elses eyes make wonder!

On the other side, when you test your program (any application even games) YOU KNOW what to do and what is allowed to do, and that's no good. You use your software as you wrote it to be used. You seriously need someone else to play with it. Probably family members are not experienced enough to do that, but an other developer might help! An other developer will know lots of issues about gaming and even will suspect your code.

But it is only an idea... :cool:

[cliffski]

I think the feedback forum here is fine for this, although you have to mentally edit out all the people working on their first space invaders clone and wanting feedback before they have contributed to the community...

[Triple_Fox]

I don't know if that's entirely true with me(I'm going to rope in a few testers anyway) since I seem to have this knack for finding horrific flaws in programs. There were innumerable times in my childhood when me and my brother would be playing some game and I would decide to see if I could short-circuit the game by doing something that had no basis in normal play. He would tell me "you CAN'T do that!" being the older brother and feeling right about things(still does), but much of the time, maybe half at most, I ended up being right and knocking out either a bug or a design flaw. The design flaws were usually more profitable gameplay-wise, though sometimes they broke the game so completely that it wasn't any fun with them.

Once I played a simple chess game written in Basic for the Atari 800. I decided to ignore the rules and make invalid moves. The game allowed these moves quite happily, such that I was able to win by just warping a few pawns on top of the computer's most dangerous pieces.

[Mark Fassett]

You do have to let outside people see your game, and it's best if they're not friends, relatives, etc... However, as the developer of the game, you know the rules for the game, you know what should and shouldn't be allowed, and you are the person most capable of testing your own code for flaws. The only thing required is that you test the game systematically. Make a test plan, follow it through. Don't just test willy-nilly. Test early, test often. Every time you add a new feature, test the crap out of it. Spend 15 minutes writing down potential faults and expected behaviors, and then figure out ways to test those. Being close to the code is a benefit, not a curse.

The reason for outside testers is to test the gameplay on other people, and to see how the game works on more hardware than you can play it on by yourself. Outside testers should not be your first line of defense.

[AndyN]

The reason for outside testers is to test the gameplay on other people, and to see how the game works on more hardware than you can play it on by yourself. Outside testers should not be your first line of defense.

The issue that was pointed out to me thankfully wasn't a total game breaker - more of an annoyance. I'm going to commit myself on my next project to making more solidly defined alpha and beta stages and asking as many people as possible to check them out.

I think the feedback forum here is fine for this, although you have to mentally edit out all the people working on their first space invaders clone and wanting feedback before they have contributed to the community...
That's one of the reasons I didn't ask for feedback for my game. As I'd pretty much finished it before finding these forums I would have felt a bit cheeky just saying 'Here's my game, I've never been here before but give me feedback, now!" :)

As a side note, does anyone ever contact their existing customers as potential beta testers for new products?

[JoshuaSmyth]

Well with my soon-to-be released first game, I've released 3 Alpha versions and 2 Beta versions, all open to the public, but being pretty much an unknown getting exclusive testers wouldn't have got me as many as just leaving it open on my website. Most feedback given to me was technical faults, which is what I was after, quite a few people suggested new features. However I had the design written up before hand and made sure that feature creep would not enter the project. But I thanked them for their suggestions and if they were good (As many were) I wrote them down in case I ever wanted to implement them in the future or in an expansion/sequal

Now I'm waiting for a new video card to come to me in the mail because many people have reported problems with this card, I need to get one for myself to fix the problem. So in the meantime I try to play my game once a day, as well as go through all the different options and settings and things to see if theres something that I've overlooked cause I was too eager to get a release out there and in the last 3 days I've found something (albeit small) that needed to be fixed each day.

[papillon]

Are you worried at all about being mistaken for PeachSoft? :) (Although I don't think they ever *did* manage to finish that game project they've been supposedly working on forever.)

[JoshuaSmyth]

Are you worried at all about being mistaken for PeachSoft? :) (Although I don't think they ever *did* manage to finish that game project they've been supposedly working on forever.)

Hrmm... I remember searching for the name when I first registered it, guess I didn't think of looking for variations of the name. This might pose a problem...