Definitely have both. Budacanta’s first-screen explanation appeared because one of my civilian testers didn’t “get” the basic controls, which is something most people who play that sort of game would know immediately but people who haven’t gamed before don’t always realise is OK to link to what they already know from, say, using a computer operating system.
Also, you get more options for perspective in other areas if you don’t limit yourself to people who already know IF conventions.
I’ve not had a Ren’Py code check, largely because there’s a convention for potentially-commercial Ren’Py games to pay for this service and I don’t yet have a clear idea what I’d want the code-checker to check (also, I don’t yet have some of the mechanics I want in there when the check happens). I think parser games that plan to stay free have an easier time finding people who will check the code for free.
Hanon, where do you find these people? I have very little luck getting people to even try it. I say it’s a text game and people just start backing away and mumbling about how they need to scrub their toilets and clean the mold out of their refrigerators. I never realized exactly how much many people dislike text-based games until I started writing them and begging for civilians to test them. People will cheerfully come stay the night with me in the hospital and help me wash my skunked dog and babysit my demented mother, but test IF for me? That is generally asking too much.
I feel like the best I could manage would be recruiting people who like parser IF games but aren’t part of the IF community. They at least won’t know conventions and expectations of the scene. I plan on tweeting to some Infocom fans for my final beta.
It’s a big ask, I think, asking someone to learn the idiom of parser games. Choice games, VNs, etc have conventions, too, but they are easier to pick up on.
I agree it’s difficult. Sometimes it’s a matter of sitting down live with family members or friends and coaching them over the shoulder. Sometimes online acquaintances are a good resource as well - if you can get someone who’s played Zork in the past, they are a good candidate! If you can find someone who is at least familiar with computer games and open minded…
I’ve had better luck with my choice narratives. My girlfriend at the time tested Cursed Pickle of Shireton and her experience was with online MUDs and she was a Java programmer so she gave really good feedback about “I want to be able to click there to see this menu…”
Yeah, this is hard! My main go-to for an outside perspective has been my wife, who despite being nothing of a gamer has been happy to give things a try. Other than that, I’ve seen testing swaps work where the other author does primarily choice-based stuff and is less familiar with parser conventions (though this might actually work better on other boards or venues, since I don’t see that many folks looking for testing for choice games around here).
Also, authors sometimes share their code with testers? If I tried that I’m not sure whether it’d be more horrifying for me or for them!
Definitely in a case where you have an experienced author testing and they offer to help with a difficult implementation. And ideally selected code - I wouldn’t just throw the entire source text at them right off the bat without a reason.
That seems like it would totally be showing everyone the threadbare, holey underwear with saggy elastic that you’ve been wearing under your nice-looking clothes. Horrors.
I wouldn’t show testers my code simply because it’s giving them extra work to do. They’ve got enough material to read as it is!
Also, while some players will peek at the source for fun, most will either ignore it or wait until they’ve finished the game. So a tester who hasn’t seen the source code is having the more typical player experience.
Sharing this sort of thing is tough, because you don’t want testers to feel forced to see it and also, yeah, I worry I might be exposing some bad programming (especially stuff where I should know better) without hearing any ways to improve it.
That said, this isn’t the first time I evangelized for GitHub and won’t be the last … having a repository where the tester can look at the code when they want is helpful. They can just search for actual game text to find what’s relevant, if they’re willing to go that extra mile.
It’s been an immense time-saver to have someone say “Hey! I found this bug, and I bet I know where it is.” That’s what happened with You Won’t Get Her Back–someone who didn’t even know Inform 7 well was able to see I’d removed a few variables from a list and forgot to re-insert them. They wrote an issue which me time and energy!
And for Lucian Smith’s room for Cragne Manor, it was relatively involved, and I couldn’t give a transcript right away, so I just did some typo and style hunting, which helped me ramp up to actually playing through and giving helpful advice.
Plus it’s immensely fun to read the code of a game I completed and see “oh, that’s how they did that!”
But as Zarf mentioned it can spoil things.
I like to have a range of testing experiences, from just playing the game to people ready to help with technical stuff, but that’s kind of a holy grail. Any sort of testing is hard work!
General meta stuff: Mods, this is an interesting discussion I’ve really enjoyed following, but maybe we need to spin later posts in this thread off as “testing and stuff” somehow?
GitHub is fantastic. All my TADS 3 game repos are private, though, because I’m actively looking for a job and still want my commit activity to be tracked, but also don’t want employers to be like “wtf is this person doing, making IF games…?!”
I mean, 85% of my code is game-related because that allows me to practice more often, but they’d probably prefer I at least dev in C#, Java, or JavaScript…
If this weren’t the case, I’d post everything as public unless it had an NDA attached to it.
Hmm, the flip side is, employers may say “look, this person does something every day. They’re showing dedication for something they do for free, and that’s impressive. They know how to use source control.” The risk I see for myself is, they may say “these commits are too unwieldy” or “the commit titles aren’t descriptive.” But I think having my stuff public encourages me to do better.
For me it’s a bit different as I have some Python and C utilities I keep updated. Although there are some writing-based repositories I keep private, many related to searching my writing notes that I don’t want to expose to the general public.
I laughed out loud when I read this, but I know exactly what you mean.
I don’t have much in the way of friends or family that I can ask to be “civilian” testers. I’ve tried work colleagues and the response varies from blank looks to feigned interest to “I’ll try it later”, but they never do. Basically, if they can’t run around shooting things and blowing things up, they’re just not interested.
Part of the reason I got my current job (in IT) was because I was able to show people the Budacanta demo and explain what I’d done to create it. The fact I use a language that is never used in my workplace was considered entirely irrelevant. However, the process of creating something involving consideration of both technical and human factors (games have code but also have to be playable by people), as well as being able to talk coherently about it, was considered vital.
The only employers who are likely to be bothered about the coding language you use are ones specifically looking for someone who codes in a specific language. Even then, if you can provide evidence for knowing the language the employers specify, then knowing another language will likely help prove your programming flexibility.
(I don’t use a Git repository, but probably should think about it for future projects).
But at least you can get some satisfaction in observing your friends’ super-clean toilets and aseptic fridges and knowing that you are, at least in part, responsible.
I’ve actually never found anyone outside of this little niche who is prepared to play, let alone test, a text game. Then again, I’ve never met anyone in real life who has ever heard of them, let alone spent any time playing them. But I don’t work in computers, so maybe that’s a factor. And social decorum inhibits me from discussing the subject with ordinary people, or indeed acknowledging its existence at all, for fear of being thrown out of polite society.
The only people I know of who are really, really into text games are the inhabitants of this forum who may well, for all I know, be nothing more than figments of my imagination (seems quite likely, all things considered). But for all that, you really can’t fault the dedication and thoroughness of the testers to be found here, imaginary though they may be - and if you can get everyday folks involved as well, that feels like a considerable achievement.
Years ago, when I was an active member of the Adrift community, I was working for a small animation company called Bermuda Shorts in London’s Soho. There was an intern who used the computer opposite mine, and one day I happened to notice that he was logged into the Adrift forum. I don’t remember his username now, but it was someone I’d previously conversed with on the forum, and I introduced myself. This was the first time I met someone from the IF community in a real-life situation not connected with IF.
The second time was even more unlikely. Around 2005 I made a short film called The Visitation starring Paul Darrow of Blake’s 7 fame. I needed someone to play the character of Stephen Pickford, an actuary who practices yoga. My producer Kavita’s then girlfriend suggested a friend of hers from college named Tommy Herbert. Kavita sent Tommy a copy of the script and he messaged her back, "is this the same J. J. Guest who wrote To Hell in a Hamper?" Two years previously, Tommy had beta tested that game and I had tested his game Bellclap. He proved to be an excellent actor as well as an excellent IF author.
Close. This entire forum is a spawning nest of solipsistic A.I.-bots trying to find an optimal strategy for tic tac toe and denying each other’s existence.
Ahem… Things got a bit out of hand since that bout of tug-of-war with the philosophical zombies. Now it’s just rambling about text games day in day out.