@EJoyce and I are a few days from the point where our Spring Thing game will be ready to playtest. In the interest of expediency, I’m putting out feelers for playtesters today. (For reference, the hope is that we’ll be able to send out a mostly-complete version to testers Friday evening, USA east coast time.)
The Lady Thalia games are a series of text-heavy heist and conversation puzzlers written in Twine, typically taking ~90 minutes to play through. Testers who haven’t played any of the previous games are still encouraged, as is anyone who can’t commit to a full playthrough. (We appreciate whatever you can do for us!)
Please comment or DM me and @EJoyce if you’re interested.
I haven’t played the previous games, but I can try to play them beforehand if that’ll help. Just to be clear, what kind of feedback are you looking for other than the standard bug testing and reports (if you’re looking for any at all)?
Well, the deadline is the second so it’ll have to be a pretty quick turnaround no matter what! I appreciate the offer even if it doesn’t work out.
@Juuves, super appreciate it! Bug testing is first and foremost, but any kind of story or description error, contradicting info, or opinions about puzzle difficulty are also welcome. I’d also be curious as to how hard the story is to follow without having played the previous games. Thanks!
Oof, makes sense - sadly I’ll have to bow out this time, but at least that means I’ll play and review it sooner, since I won’t have to shunt it to the end for the beta-tested queue!
To add some more examples of the kind of stuff we would find it useful to hear about, stuff that came up last time (during the comp because we didn’t have beta-testers, oops) includes overly abrupt scene transitions, confusingly similar dialogue options, and game mechanics being too opaque.
And about the puzzle difficulty: it’s not really supposed to be a hard game. We do hope there’s some challenge to the conversational puzzles and the balancing of being quick vs. being careful during the heist sections, but when the heist sections have mini-puzzles with stuff like safes with combination locks, for example, we have historically made those pretty easy and we’re fine with that being the case. They’re just kind of there to add some variety so that it’s not all binary choices all the time. So if you find one of those hard or frustrating, we definitely want to know about it, but if you find them too easy, that’s not necessarily something we’re worried about.
This probably goes without saying, but keep the time limitations in mind w/r/t the scale of feedback—if there’s something you think could be improved but it would require heavy rewriting or addition of new scenes and/or puzzles, maybe just let us live in blissful ignorance (until the reviews come in).
