I’m wondering if there’s a place here to request playtesting of a game that is almost ready for Steam release. A friend who played the game recently had an error message pop up when he ran it, and I want to iron out any such issues before I start distribution. I also would like some general feedback on difficulty/balance and anything else I might want to tweak before go-live. Here’s a couple of screenshots of gameplay.
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Since you are planning to release it on Steam, why not put a beta version up already? You can then hand out Steam keys to testers. I would give it a try.
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Thanks - I’m not very up on the possibilities on Steam. I only just saw as I was preparing my storefront page that it is possible to open up the game to a limited set of play testers. Sounds like the way to go. I’ll let you know once I’ve got it ready.
You can find testers from the MonoGame Discord usually. MonoGame Discord
For making and managing beta builds, you can also use a service that itch.io offers called The itch.io refinery - distribute in-development games your way - itch.io
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Steam Playtest is quite good - it creates a distinct store page and you can give out keys working only on that playtest version - also you can just open it up to random players applying for playtesting, but if you do that you should give some ingame way to report bugs (and measure usage etc), as most of them wont report anything otherwise.
I did steam playtest and liked that it is its own “entity” (own community page, own workshop etc, basically it has its own steam app id) I can just hand out keys and dont need to bother with the release version in any way. The Playtest Page can just get copied over from your regular store page but you would need to wait for steam to approve it first (like a regular store page).
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