I made a personal goal a bunch of months ago to finish/release my game Quintet (web/ipad) by the end of the year. The idea of the game is that up to 5 people control 1 ship (captain, helm, tactical, engineering, science). I’ve spent most of my spare time, nights/weekends/etc. working on this goal.
Every 2 weeks I’ve had friends come by my office space on Friday and play the game with me in the conference room. We had left over wine from a party here so it cost me $0 to have 8 people test my game. Most were non-gamers, and I really got to see what was fun to them, what was confusing, what they got and didn’t get. I for instance changed the word “thruster” to “speed”… I made the engineering part much simpler. I saw what features people never used and dropped them. Overall, I stopped giving players more “work” to do, and instead gave them more “fun” to do. On a second occasion I bought 2 bottles of wine ($8 to $10 each) people brought chips and stuff. $20 to get 2 hours of testing from 8 people or so is a pretty sweet deal.
I was feeling pretty good and ready to go, but I needed to test the game out on an iPad with a retina display, so I found a place that rented them. I picked up the iPad and when I got home, I loaded the game, it looked great on iPad… but then something was wrong… I couldn’t join my own ship from my other computer…
… but there was nothing wrong, the reason I couldn’t join it was because other people already had… all of a sudden there were people playing. Lots of ships (I peaked at about 37 users at one time) 9 ships in play at a time. I asked them where they came from and they all said reddit.com
Someone was even live streaming them playing!
Apparently… some random person posted a link to my game on there and it brought in literally over 100 different people over the weekend. I woke up in the middle of the night and people were still playing.
My previous testing had people in the same room with me… and I couldn’t help myself but explain stuff to them… but now with random people on the Internet, I realized I needed some features (like private chat) to help those people work together, as well as a way to eject someone off of your ship. I also discovered some more bugs. I would have pushed the app not truly ready… but the random link on reddit helped me tremendously.
Lessons Learned:
- I really really had to drop half of my planned features and then drop even more in order to get it done.
- The feeling of watching people play my game, laugh when they died and have a good time was one of the best feelings ever.
- Watch other people play your game when they have no instruction. You will learn a lot. Don’t explain yourself to them. Just watch what they do.
- The reddit post to /r/gaming brought 10x more people to my game then posting to unity work in progress forum or other gamedev sites… but it wasn’t me posting the link, and my game was pretty done-ish…
Link to my game: http://quintet.us
Reddit post: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/15kxiv/quintet_a_multiplayer_space_game_where_up_to_5/
Archive of live stream someone did (hilarious commentary!): http://www.twitch.tv/yups23/b/352676426
