Hi, I found 20 playtesters(which i reach them from league of legends) but they found about 1 or 2 bugs and i could find these bugs pretty easy and i can’t even test the controller support because none of them has controller. In my opinion playtest not worth it at least you should pay for the playtesters like pro playtesters or something.
“Hey, I tired cooking. Just tossed some ingredients in a pan and let it sit for a while, turned out half-burnt and half-raw. In my opinion, cooking is not worth it, alt least you should pay for pro chefs or something.”
You already explained the problem, not sure what the question is?
The problem is i thought someone can help me, give advice. Hey i am going to be sarcastic and doesn’t help anyone. I will not even try helping even tossing some random advice. I am here for just mocking people.
When you handed them the project to try out did you give them any instructions?
I told them basics of the game, how to play. Told them if they find any bug or weird thing it would be nice if they tell me.
If I had to guess that’s the most likely reason why they didn’t find anything you wouldn’t have found. You want at least some of your play testers to go in blind and let them figure things out for themselves.
Game is very basic like vampire survivors there is not much https://store.steampowered.com/app/2370950/Zombie_Exterminator/
Then you should clearly ask for advice and give more information about your situation. What game are you working on? Does it have a budget? What platforms are you planning to launch it on?
Playtesting is definitely worth it. So is paying for it if you can afford it. Depending on the scope and platforms of your project, you can maybe handle some or all of it by yourself but at some point that becomes untenable.
There’s also different kinds of playtesting. Are you looking for what players are enjoying and were they are frustrated? Are you looking to test your game on as many different devices as possible? Do you want testers to 100% your game to make sure there are no blockers? Do you want to make sure the game doesn’t crash in the tutorial?
All those require specific approaches and different skillsets of the people that do the tests. Some if it will be hard if you ask people in their free time, they would have to have a strong connection to your game to be willing to invest the time required for it. Generally, voluntary playtesting is good to go wide (get a lot of people to play your game a little), while professional playtesting is good to go deep (get a few people to play your game a lot).
I don’t know what to tell. You sound like you are the lead developer of the gta V. If you ask me what playtest is for finding bugs and is your game enjoyable.
You’re thinking about this completely wrong. Playtest is just an economic decision, nothing more.
You either pay someone to play the game and report issues (professional QA) , or else you ask random people on a Discord channel to play (amateur QA).
The “is it worth it” simply refers to “If I spend X dollars to do QA, will I get X or more dollars back in value?”
Since asking people on a Discord only costs you time to type, you can expect a) it won’t have much value, and b) it might have zero value.
Note also that asking for amateur QA is likely to have NEGATIVE outcome, since you will have to invest time in training the amateurs, and at the end of the day their input may be incorrect, biased, or just not applicable to your problem space.
This is after all just engineering, which is all about economics of cost vs benefit.
Not sure why people struggle so much to understand simple economics. It’s just like the economics of source control. For instance, if you do not spend the effort to set up source control, you are saying “I don’t care if my project becomes corrupt.” This is an economic choice.
For playtesting on GTA’s scale we wouldn’t be talking here in the first place. But I’ve worked on a few medium- and small-sized indie games and have done playtesting myself and with professionals before.
Those are the questions you need to ask yourself to do playtesting efficiently. As @Ryiah hinted at, you need to first have a clear understanding of what you want and need and then you can find the right people and the right way to communicate your requirements to them. Playtesting is a wide and complicated field and just taking shots in the dark won’t get you very far.
For qualitative playtesting, it’s best meet people in person, watch them play with as little help as possible and then do an interview afterwards. What people say also doesn’t need to be exactly what you do, sometimes you want to do the opposite of what playtesters are telling you.
For bug/performance playtesting, you want to establish a clear testing plan that defines what should be tested and how. You should also prepare a form or spreadsheet where people can enter issues and with pre-defined fields to make sure you get all the information you need. It might also be a good idea to have bug submission directly in your beta build, then you can collect additional data automatically and making it as easy as possible for players to submit bugs increases the chance they will report them.
In my limited, non-professional experience, amateur play-testers don’t tell you much. You have to watch them play.
And getting likes 
So he must be doing something right.
people like who similar to themselves.
If you come soliciting guidance and dismiss common guidance as “group think,” you have a TERRIBLE life strategy!!!
You are saying these people only think similar because they think similar.
How about we have decades of experience making games and observing people play our games?
That’s just myself. I can’t speak for anyone else.
EDIT: earliest claim to fame… I wrote an Apple II BASIC version (my own code) of the classic STAR TREK game and won second prize in the school science contest in 1981 for it. I watched a LOT of people play that game and tuned and changed values in the difficulty as a direct result. I didn’t even know what QA or Playtest meant … I was in 8th grade.
@Kurt-Dekker Should I now like your comment though? I don’t want to be seen as a Kurtophile
Just gonna leave this here if OP cares to learn something:
I have been at this for a while and every time people I know in my personal life find out that I write code, and that code sometimes includes videogames, I invariably get the “Oh man, I’ll playtest for you!” And I invariably always respond “Oh, you don’t want to do that.”
Playtesting is miserable. I would not ask anyone to playtest for me of their for free because all we’re going to do is waste each other’s time.
Let me back up… technically there is 3 different things I might call playtesting.
1) Gameplay User Experience Testing
Testing the user experience and enjoyment of an MVP to full completed game. This occurs after most QA playtesting has been done on the version I’m handing them. This type of playtesting is where I give a blind user the game and usually just watch them play. I want to see where they get frustrated, where they have fun, if they struggle to understand how to play the game. Note that my project size is small enough that I can have hands on testing… if I had a real budget I may turn this into a “survey” since I couldn’t be present for everyone. While still observing a smaller hand selected group.
The intent of this “playtest” is not to find bugs.
It’s to ensure that my game makes sense as a game. If users will actually enjoy it.
2) QA Playtesting
There is where I have someone who knows how to qa play the game and specifically hunt for bugs. While I’d love to pay people to do this… it’s expensive. So usually it’s just me and my partner doing it. We also have our best friend help us as he used to be a professional QA tester for Vicarious Visions (the same company my partner worked at for years) who are part of Blizzard Activision these days. Out of the gracious kindness of his heart… combined with the fact we’ve known each other since we were 13 years olds… he will offer up his assistance.
QA testing is HARD.
QA testing is BORING.
QA testing expects the tester to document the issues they find in a reproduceable manner. A QA tester needs to think about the game not from the perspective of how they would play it… but how ANYONE would play it. They will load up a game and just bang on it in ways you never would expect as a developer. I’ve watched my buddy Ed just spin around in circles as our character just to see if he could clip into things and cause issues… also… the spinning added a level of glee to what is otherwise a boring job. (My buddy play tested the Guitar Hero series… you can’t even begin to comprehend the levels of DULL playtesting Guitar Hero 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, plus OT, for years since that series had multiple titles.)
I would never expect someone to do this free.
It is a very structured process often with some sort of bug reporting pipeline (see: ticketing system). You’ll often iterate on it with weekly, or even daily builds if you’re fast paced. Even in the simplest low budgetest of situations requires some semblance of skill.
3) Those people who find out you make games and say they’ll “playtest” for you… i.e. Discord mates
It’s a crapshoot of garbage.
Unfortunately the vast majority of gamers don’t comprehend what an unfinished game is actually like. And even when they have some level of familiarity with it… it infuriates them. Because they look at a game as a toy to have fun with, not a piece of software to be tested.
And I mean… rightfully so. They’re not professional game testers!
They’re gamers. They play games.
See, that guy I told you about before who I knew since 13 years old who QA’d at VV. See he and my partner went to college together at Savannah College of Art & Design. A pretty prestigious art college in Georgia (we from the south yo). They both went for games development stuff. Game design, 3d art, linear art, animation, etc. While they were doing that I was driving a tractor trailer around the country like the hillbilly I am. When they got out of college they convinced me I should learn to program so we could make games together.
Within 6 months my partner and I had portfolios landing us jobs in Albany NY (VV) and Los Angeles (some startup doing what squarespace is doing today).
Our buddy though… yeah… he learned that he HATES MAKING GAMES.
He’s a gamer. He likes playing games. Unfortunately he didn’t realize it until after piling up art college debt!
He’s now an RN. He QA’d at VV while putting himself through college a second time to get his nursing degree.
The point of this anecdote is that many people think they like the concept of making games and want to partake in some manner when they hear you could make that available. And since they know they can’t art, or code, or what not… they assume “playtesting” would be fine. I mean come on… you get to play games all day! THE DREAM!
…
It’s miserable.
And so you hand this off to some people who don’t realize what actually goes into testing a game and they don’t really give you much feedback because… well… they don’t know how! At best the game had no bugs and they just played it and you effectively got my first entry of “playtesting” with out any survey/observer. At worst… they get frustrated and stop playing your broken ass garbage game… gawd… why’d you not fix this shit before giving it to them? You make terrible games… gawd… I’m going to go play a REAL game now.
Sure 1 in 20 might actually realize what the job actually is and give you a little something something. But they’re not getting paid… so… they’ll do enough to feel like they tried and gave you the “free” worth that you gave them.
Basically making it all pointless.
You wasted everyone’s time, including your own.
Now go back to college and become an RN.
Man, I was just getting to the point with my current project where I was hitting up my friends and asking, “Hey, do you want to play an ultra early, probably super shitty version of my game?”, to which most were keen to do.
Now I’m wondering if I should nix that idea.
If it’s all about user experience, have at it.
If it’s QA testing… I mean, I wouldn’t say don’t at all costs. Sometimes it’s all you got. Just be aware of what you’re going into and let them know as well. Let them know what you expect as a result so that they can willingly decide if that’s what they want to do.
And I mean… if all you want is to hear what they think of the game. It’ll be great. Cause they’ll likely tell you what they think of the game.
But if you want them to report bugs. Tell them what that entails. And don’t be surprised if they fail to do what that entails.
[edit] case in point I have friends who I’ve actually received help from. My buddy Ed for QA like I said before. I also had a musician buddy of mine help me with audio recording (he’s the voice of Hank in PM and GV… my wife is the voice of Cass) since he has access to high quality sound recording equipment.
But we went into it mutually understanding how complex this was going to be. How much of a favor he was truly doing. When we were on hour 8 of VO recording… he didn’t get whiny… cause he knew what he signed up for. He was happy to offer assistance because he knew we were passionate and he wanted to be part of that.
Alternatively, if you play GV, there’s a lot of Japanese VO as well. My partner happened to be working in Japan at the time and recorded his workmates over break at lunch on his cellphone. The audio quality is garbo, and well… if you actually spoke Japanese you’d find the quality questionable. They’re basically just reading lines from paper in monotone with zero direction in their local accents. But it works cause well… most people playing it aren’t Japanese.
But I couldn’t tell you the number of times I’ve had friends UPSET with me that I let them play a broken game. Not so upset that they were angry… but like… visibly annoyed that the experience wasn’t what they anticipated.