Monday, April 02, 2012

Beta Testing

I should have included a note about this in the original post.

Up to this point, there have been basically two testers, and they've done yeoman work: John Harwood and Paul Costello. They've tested dozens of different builds, suffered through bugs and crashes, and suggested enhancements and new features.

I still have a to-do list I'm working through before I'm ready for a wider group of people to playtest. I want to get those done before anything else happens.

After that list is finished (I think it will be 3-4 weeks, roughly), there will be a "family and friends" beta for about ten people. That will be all the feedback I can handle and process at that point. After another 4-6 weeks, I should then be ready to have a larger beta with 30-50 people.

During that period, I will be looking for a distributor, which is a wide open concept for me right now. Having an .exe with a game on it is very different from having an installable package, etc., so that's another learning curve I'll be going through.

The timeframe I'm using right now for the entire beta process is about 4 months. That could be wildly optimistic or terribly pessimistic--it's hard to estimate time when I've never done any of this before.

I will definitely put up a post when I'm ready for the wider beta, and if any of you guys are interested, just let me know.

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