If you’re seeking beta-testers for a piece, and you have a Facebook with a decent number of friends, have you tried just posting a status asking who’s up for it?
I made a post here, a call on game-testing.org, a public tweet, and a Facebook status all around the same time, and the only one that yielded responses that day was Facebook, with two people willing to try it. I re-posted the status today and got another five people willing to give my piece a try - so in less than three full days I got seven people without thinking about it, all from posting a status on my FB.
Has anyone else tried leveraging modern social media to get beta-testers or to release a piece or anything?
Today one of my professors was discussing leveraging social media for e-commerce, and afterwards (half as a joke) I said, “You never mentioned Multi-User Dungeons!” His response was, “MUDS!? Nobody uses MUDs! Nobody used MUDs when they first came out!”
So if you’re on here and you’re using LiveJournal…you may still be twenty years more modern than you could be. But I definitely make no value judgments on varying levels of modernness.
If there is, I’m not part of it. I’m not really into LJ communities; all of my LJ friends are real-life friends. Conveniently many of them are at least casually into IF (with arguably most of them into at least one of storytelling, puzzles, and writing/debugging code), and it’s worked out reasonably well for me to use testers who are a bit IF-naive but good at trying to find loopholes and/or breaking points.
That, I imagine, is very helpful. I suppose it is useful to acquire a large group of intelligent and curious friends with a decent amount of spare time?
I’m not surprised it’s inactive, though I am mildly disappointed.
My estimate of the average is three to five, but that’s just what people usually have - if you’re asking what’s the best amount of testers to have, the answer is the more you can find the better.
Well enough so far. They haven’t gotten sick of me yet, but give me a few more games and I bet I can start scaring them off …
I can’t personally imagine having fewer than seven or eight for a full-sized game (less would probably be fine for a snack-sized one). So far, I’ve been targeting a dozen per game, with the understanding that there may be a dropout or two. The level of redundancy at a dozen is pretty high, but absolutely every tester (in my experience) will find at least one thing to make you grateful you signed them on. If I ever go larger in scope than I’ve gone so far (which one of my WIPs is likely to) I’ll go above a dozen.
No worries then It’ll be interesting to learn if your dropout rate is higher/lower/same, etc … keep us posted!
My story is definitely snack-sized but I haven’t the remotest idea how many people are actually going to stick around or provide useful feedback, especially since most of them aren’t super-familiar with IF. There’s a lot of “I don’t really understand what you did but I want to try it out anyway!”
Will do! Almost all of my beta-testers are in college right now, and it’s reached the crazy part of the semester for pretty much everyone, so I can’t even get a good idea of who’s actually testing until after the first week of May. >_< Demographics problems I hadn’t even considered.
