Mailbag: Getting Beta-Testers for Parser IF

I know you’re busy, and hopefully you didn’t delete this as spam ;-)

I’m writing my first interactive fiction game. Although it’s not finished, I’m already looking ahead to finding beta testers – beyond the few friends I have who once way back when played the original Infocom games.

I imagine it takes time to establish the relationships necessary to get people to the point they’re actually willing to take a look. Do you have any advice?

An aside: I’m a computer programmer and using Inform 7. It’s a nice system, and I get it. But I am not familiar with the culture of IF users. (For example, the authors of the Inform manual mention how disabling the UNDO function when the story ends is anathema to many players.) Also, just understanding how to make beta-testers’ jobs easier in general would be nice.

A first step would be to hang out a bit at the intfiction forum or possibly euphoria (I haven’t been to the latter for a while, so I don’t know how active it is, but it’s more of a chat space). Introduce yourself, participate in a few conversations.

It sometimes helps to offer to beta-test for other people, for two reasons: one, it builds those social connections, and two, it familiarizes you with how other people typically do this. If you’re planning to enter a competition, sometimes there are threads in the weeks before the competition deadline where authors are offering to swap beta-testing, and that can also be a useful way to pick up help.

Alternatively, if you live near Baltimore, Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, or London, there is a live meetup that meets pretty regularly near you, and those can be a great place to cultivate connections more quickly. My link roundups twice a month list all the events I know of that are coming up in the near future, but you may already have seen these.

As for expectations and norms: it’s a good idea to read some reviews of recently released games, especially ones that might be similar to yours; they may help you work out what people are expecting and what goes over well or badly. You don’t have to take this as gospel, of course, and sometimes you just really want to do something with your work that isn’t in the expected range. That’s fine. But it can be helpful to know what people are looking for so that you’re not too surprised. One way to look for that information is to check out IFDB and find games in your genre/style and see what people wrote about those. You could also read through reviews from the latest IF Comp to get more of a cross-section view.

Suggestions for Testing is a fairly old article of mine, but as it’s about parser IF, a lot of the recommendations still hold. It talks about what testers might expect to do, and what authors might expect from testers.

Preparing a Game for Testing is about figuring out where your game is likely to present problems so that you can look at those yourself before you ship it off.