So first, an update:
Beta testing is going fairly well. After about a week's worth of testing, fixing bugs, rewriting certain scenes and spell-checking the hell out of Master of the House, it's finally beginning to feel like a complete and coherent game, thanks in huge part to all of my beta testers. I've sent out what is hopefully a final beta version to help remove any further rough edges and polish it even more. I don't like the idea of giving a date for release, because obviously real-life circumstances can get in the way, so I'll leave it as a general 'soon'...hopefully...maybe.
Second, a word of encouragement to anyone writing a game of their own:
I was so excited when I 'finished' writing my game and started contacting beta testers about look at it. I had done it! I'd made my first game after hours, and hours, and hours (and then a few more hours) of writing and coding and I felt great! Nothing was going to stop me from releasing the awesomest, greatest game ever!!!!!!
Many of you who have authored games before can probably tell where this is headed. In my naive mind, all of the difficult work was done and I could just relax and let the beta testing handle itself. To my shame, I was in such a hurry to get the game out that I didn't even proofread a good portion of the text for the game, leaving a deplorable number of mistakes. And those issues were far from only ones.
When I first started receiving feedback for the game, I was incredibly depressed. My testers would send me pages upon pages of inconsistencies, bugs, and suggestions and I felt like I was drowning in the amount of work that I still had left to do to in order for Master of the House to be the best I could produce. It can be a hard blow when you realize that something you spent so much time and energy on wasn't the shining gem you thought it was. Especially when some of the problems were so obvious that I wasn't sure how I'd missed them myself (no, the main character shouldn't be allowed to run around naked! and yes, you should be able to sit on chairs!). I'd even considered scrapping it at one point, even though I was so close to finishing it. But I slowly worked out a lot of the issues, and with the encouragement and support of my first round of beta testers, I began seeing how the changes and fixes were taking my rough start and making it 1000 times better.
My spirits were much better when I started the second round of testing after my accident, girded with the knowledge that perfection was still a long way off...and that was okay. I took a lot of the feedback this time as a positive rather than a negative, and used it to push myself to improve my coding abilities. Case in point: One of the characters would give you a blowjob no matter where you were, or who was in the room with you. Now, I may have fantasies about just such a woman in real life, but that wasn't supposed to happen in the game. It took me about 3 hours to sort out how to fix it, mainly because it had certain restrictions tied to it from an earlier scene and also had to be separate from similar commands in future scenes. Long story short(er), I learned things I hadn't considered before in ADRIFT and made me realize that if I made the same game over again, I could reduce the amount of time spent programming by a great deal. Live and learn, as they say.
The point I'm trying to get across, in my own verbose way, is that you can't do everything on your own--or at least you shouldn't. I've had wonderful experiences with my beta testers. They've been hardworking, insightful and conscientious and Master of the House wouldn't be nearly as good without they're help. Don't be afraid to reach out when you feel stuck, bounce questions off someone else when you hit a stumbling block, or look for a word of encouragement from members of the AIF (and IF) community. For my second game (blog post on that after MotH is finished), I'm already planning on having at least one person look through it well before it ever reaches testing, just to make suggestions and catch mistakes before it takes three hours to correct them.
Moral of the blog post:
It takes an AIF community to raise an AIF game.
Yours,
Minterlint
I always have stupid little things that don't seem all that consequential cropping up in beta testing, until I realise that I just can't leave the problem and it's going to take ages to try to fix.
ReplyDeleteStill, I'd mention you should also try to see the fun side of beta testing. For a while everyone's talking about your game and they're interested in it. Ironically often a really polished game that's not illogical to play is actually likely to get not much said about it, because people don't need any help, so it's always nice to get the beta responses.