In summary: the mates you lure into it are just players who play for fun and may or may not stumble upon some bugs inadvertently (edited, chrome’s grammar autocorrect isn’t that great lately). QA testers are colleagues who aren’t playing for fun but to find issues with the software.
If you’re feeling adventurous you could try using Unity’s ML Agents to automatically play the game.
https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/ml-agents
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzDRvYVwl53vehwiN_odYJkPBzcqFw110
Not only that, and I concur with everything, but you really need these people to be literate in how games are actually made. Most QA testers normally do not pass this test, but some do, and they’re soon promoted to leads, supervisors, officers, managers…
In fact, in a typical twist of fate in this industry (though I believe it has become quite rare in recent years), these literate QA individuals are nearly always failed developers, who couldn’t for some reason enter the game dev world through high education or hands-on experience with software engineering, aka the front door. Yet they’re talented.
These people are invaluable in software development, because they are not developers, yet they think like ones. You will never meet them on a random forum or Discord, because they aspire to work in the industry, and so the big studios (and big QA facilities) are more likely to hold onto them.
Such people are capable of providing quality analysis of what went wrong, pinpoint areas where the problems could’ve originated from. They are likely to anticipate errors because they know the collective mindset and the blind spots of the actual programmers. They can run the issues down by setting up snares and initial conditions because they have a good hunch for how to induce or reproduce some unexpected behavior. They are inclined to push the software to its limits, and they simply love to deconstruct, connect and disconnect, compare, or break apart. The fact that they’re not the one constructing or caring for the solutions beneath it, makes them ruthless in this endeavor and because of their work any software will only become a better product.
These are the QA unicorns basically, and the only people I would actually bother with, otherwise I can do a vastly better job myself. So good luck with finding one.
If, on the other hand, we’re exclusively talking about gameplay commentary, balance feedback, or supervised experience test, that’s also called a QA, but tbh this is more about the focus / feedback groups and monitoring, and has almost nothing to do with the engineering side. Instead it’s more about marketing, game design, cultural reception, and user experience. If you need this kind of service you’re either a very large company where every product and every feature is designed by a committee to be implemented by an army, or you really don’t know what the hell you’re doing.
Really, like the video I linked, it’s about finding out if the game is fun or not, and if I need to turn in one direction or another, or even continue with the idea at all. “What did you find fun, if anything?” “Do you think the core concept is a good idea?” “What did you find most interesting?”
Just want to get feedback to give me some direction about what’s good or not super early so I don’t waste my time going in the wrong direction. So on that note:
Yeah that’s all want to hear, for now. Bugs I can weed out on my own in due time.
So sounds like it’ll still be worth my time. Most of my friends will give me their unfiltered opinion.
This sounds like the perfect situation to have friends play your game. They can overlook the bugs as it’s a work in progress, but they don’t have to tackle finding the bugs for you. They’re there to just play and try to have fun.