Beta Testers Urgently Required!

[Lazzah]

Hi all,

Since I asked for playtesters for "Magnetic Moon" last February, I have also programmed the two other games in the "Mike Erlin" series, "Starship Quest" and "Revenge of the Space Pirates".

I cannot release any of these games until they have been playtested, so if you have some spare time on your hands and would like to help me out, please send me a PM.

Many thanks.

[Lumin]

Possibly too late for this but just pointing out that there are a few people in my Discord who both can be convinced to play IF games and aren't especially familiar with IF convention if that's useful at all.

The Discord thread is somewhere in General, I expect not especially far down the page from where I first posted it months ago.

[Lazzah]

Possibly too late for this but just pointing out that there are a few people in my Discord who both can be convinced to play IF games and aren't especially familiar with IF convention if that's useful at all.

The Discord thread is somewhere in General, I expect not especially far down the page from where I first posted it months ago.

Hi Lumin,

I had a look at this Discord thing you mentioned above but I am afraid it is all a bit too complex for my ancient brain to navigate. If you could see a way to posting a plea for playtesters on my behalf I would be very grateful.

[Lumin]

Yeah I just saw you'd logged in. You're still on the server if you ever want to try again but you have to verify your account with Discord over email and also the account has to exist for more than five minutes for you to chat, that's just a security thing to prevent spammers but I should've mentioned it.

Discord is basically just the successor to IRC, kind of a chat / forum hybrid. Almost everyone on my server's from ChooseYourStory but there's a lot of general writing chat as well as discussion of games/movies/family and office drama etc. so it's pretty open to all if you're not bothered by four letter words.

[Lumin]

Can you send me the files? I can always pass them along and see if there's any takers. And I don't have time for full playtesting right now but I can at least check it out and let you know if anything explodes.

[Lumin]

I have a couple of potentially interested people, and a couple more who declined on the grounds that this site looked like it would give their computer AIDS. One person did download the games and the runner through google drive, but didn't get as far as figuring out how to open the games with the runner, and I was on mobile at work and couldn't really walk him through it.

I've converted the games to .exes now and I will persist. The people who have played Theo's games before are either away or still playing his newest one, but they're always possibilities later.

[Lumin]

Giving this alongside an Italian lady right now. We're both stuck in the control room still but I'm taking notes.

[Lumin]

Okay Lazzah, we gotta talk about this control room puzzle.

It's possible for enough 'time to pass' that the other lady actually lost the game bashing her head against the wall, but without specifically hitting the wait command--twice--not enough time ever passes to progress to the next part of the game.

Once we figured it out it was raaaaage inducing so I don't know, it might be worthwhile to tweak that introductory puzzle just a little. Let something the player character actually does trigger it or let it just happen on its own once a certain number of turns have passed after doing the things you're supposed to do. There's not a huge amount of stuff to interact with in the control room, you quickly run out of things to try and yet just typing 'wait' until something happens I don't think would pop into most people's minds.

The game looks impressively huge with a lot of plot to come so it would be really sad if somebody was tripped up by not being able to progress right as they were starting out and before they really had a chance to get into it.

[Lazzah]

This puzzle was part of the original Spectrum game and thus hundreds of people have played it without problem or complaint. I am not going to dumb the game down by removing it. Sorry but the game is rated Tough after all. In any case, if you read the intro the last paragraph actually says "The first obstacles you have to get past are the Captain and Commander Roffey themselves - they are both still in the main control room and you must wait until they leave then find a way of getting off the ship without being spotted by either." Isn't that enough of a clue as to what you should do?

[Lumin]

Well I went through some trouble to get people who don't normally play IF to play your game and to continue playing your game, more trouble than you were willing to go through actually. Since their experiences aren't of any value to you and you get annoyed hearing about them, we'll just stop and go back to working on our own projects, that's fine.

[Lazzah]

Well I went through some trouble to get people who don't normally play IF to play your game and to continue playing your game, more trouble than you were willing to go through actually. Since their experiences aren't of any value to you and you get annoyed hearing about them, we'll just stop and go back to working on our own projects, that's fine.

I appreciate your efforts but if I had known that you were going to ask absolute beginners to play my games I would have told you not to bother. My games are rated TOUGH and most definitely NOT suitable for beginners.

[Lumin]

I mean, I literally said they would be people unused to playing IF in my first post in this thread but not a big deal, I'm sure you'll have no issue finding more suitable players who are equally interested.

It's a moot issue now but in general I'd say there's still valuable advice that can be given by anyone serious about writing, IF newbie or not, and my friends are for the most part used to giving 1000+ word critiques on text games as a common thing.

For instance one thing that came up was that certain parts of the intro text...



...could definitely be tweaked to make for a more of an inviting hook for someone just opening the game, but I suppose if your Spectrum players had no issue then you do.