Uhm, you can ignore my point about the performance.
I just realized I ran your game on my Surface Pro 4 which was hooked up to my main monitor at the time 
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Normally for playtesting at this stage you should give a text doc or pdf explaining the instructions in detail to help the playtesters, often this includes a description of how a combat should play through. If it is the combat you really want tested at this stage then you should begin at the village.
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For a larger company, the ability is kinda built in. 
Our studio is made up three game teams and support staff as well as studio level roles, like we all have art directors on our team, plus a studio AD. (And other discipline leads). As such there is no shortage of people to test the games. Pre green light and early development it is very informal, it’s not uncommon for someone to randomly hand you an device several times a day for you to check something out.
Pre greenlight it is even more common and there will be a lot variations as we try to decide what the next game will be. Our “other” game in production right went through nearly 30 game types/genre/styles (and dozens of iterations on each of those) before landing where the are now. So a lot of testing. And frankly it’s kinda fun.
During production and closer to launch, that will still happen, but we will also do more formalized play tests. My team is launching a fairly large feature next month and we have about 3-4 scheduled play tests a week right now. And as a new game gets closer, we expand beyond the studio. Other studios/groups in the company, partners are sometimes involved (unity/ms/Apple/etc). And finally just prior to release we do user testing where we pay people to come in and play our games and we observe and record them. (Yes, we have a one-way mirror room where we can watch, ours is called the Death Star… all our rooms have names).
And, like most large studios, our last test is the geo-beta. (Also referred to a soft launch). We release the game in a market that’s demographic is similar to the market at large (usually AU or NZ), with no advertising and see how it does. Partially to ensure the game stands on its own without advertising and marketing, and also to find any problems we missed. The real bugs surface when you millions players hitting it at once. ;). Also the big help here is that while we have done tons of testing throughout the process, a vast majority of those testers are also developers. Sure the are heavy gamers also, but do have a bias.
Dunno if that helps. Basically because we have a large team, we have a lot testers. When I was indie, I just a couple of friends who were also feces or gamers I ran it by. If I were to release today, I would probably do the same. Maybe tap a few others from a community like this one.
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You’ve struck on an important point here. Feed back from other competent designers is of a different quality to feed back from gamers. I take my games along to the local game dev meetup. Everyone plays each others games. The last time I took a game for play testing the tester identified a new bug and had the solution for exactly how to fix it.
Many gamers struggle to see past ‘the input is buggy and the graphics are just cubes’. Sure you need non devs for feedback later in the process. But early in the piece just stick to other devs.
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I’ve never actually been jealous of a big studio before this comment. There is so much value in this stuff you describe here. It sounds like you have a built in environment for informal experimentation that sounds very ‘safe’, so people can try something out without having to worry about getting hammered for results that suck, as well as feedback mechanisms so that people can catch stuff that doesn’t work early before it costs too much time.
There’s also a lot of value in terms of exposure to things, both in learning what works, what doesn’t and about trade offs. I can see this kind of thing improving on peoples skill and judgement much faster.
As a solo effort, I really feel the cost of not having those kinds of resources. At a certain point, when you’ve reached something closer to an ‘expert’ level - a lot of it might become intuitive, but especially as a resource for learning – super valuable. Exposure to ideas and feedback at many different points of production is just invaluable for really becoming good at something.
@frosted - if you haven’t yet fixed on how the combat system should be implemented precisely then I would suggest in addition to the instruction pdf you lay out in detail what you are trying to achieve with the combat system and how a combat should unfold including how you want the camera to work. This should help playtesters and maybe developers that take a look come up with an idea or two or at least state for definite whether the system is working or could be made to work.
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Absolutely.
I’ve been working on this stuff. There was clearly a regression somewhere in the last week on the targeting.
This is a major mistake I also made. I thought that it was more important to keep play testers ‘fresh’ and not give them any idea of what the game was so their experience was clean. The reality is, that might be a good idea for late stage testing, but in the early steps - you absolutely need to give people this info.
I think the PDF might be too much for people (most people won’t bother to read it) but I think what I might do for the next round is include more video just showing people how I expect things to work. Same idea though, give people a bit more information about what they should expect and how to work it without having to constantly build in new screens or in game info.
I may also start including small voice recordings for crude ‘tutorial’ info. Fact is, swapping out a wav file is easy and fast and I can keep this up to date easily without having to futz around with a bunch of time consuming gui.
I’m also going to build in analytics, the reality is that I don’t get to see most people play - it’s almost all over the internet and I can’t ask people to record their sessions. I think this is also a major problem. So I’m going to start capturing as much about what people do and how their session works as I can passively. Capture timestamps and locations, certain important input or decisions, etc. It’s not as good as watching people first hand, but you gotta make the best of things.