Comment on If you could only play 10 games for the rest of your life, which would you choose?
catfeeder@piefed.blahaj.zone 14 hours ago
If you make video games, either as a career or hobby, only other people are allowed to play them
But how do I test them???
My list:
- Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. This game has so much stuff in it and it gets updates roughly two times a year with lots of rebalance and new stuff.
- Dark Souls. One of the best games ever made - how could I leave it out?
- Dark Souls 2. My second favorite Souls-like. It’s different enough from DS1 to be included here.
- Lunacid. Objectively a bad choice because it’s not very replayable but I love it and replay it all the time.
- UFO 50. Technically one game ;)
- Minesweeper. Sometimes I just want to kill time on my smartphone.
- Yume 2kki. For all my casual “I just what to wander around mindlessly” needs.
- Minetest (Luanti). Mod-heavy sandbox for my sandbox needs.
- Doom. Mod-heavy FPS for my FPS needs.
- My girlfriend’s future game of her choice so I don’t miss out on her important achievement.
BurntWits@sh.itjust.works 14 hours ago
Hire a QA team? I’m not sure, I don’t make the rules.
Oh wait, huh. Uhhh… I sort of don’t have any experience with game dev so I didn’t think of that. Maybe you can playtest but can’t play through the whole game? Or maybe you get a QA team for free to help out on passion projects, I’m not sure. I’ll let you decide on this one maybe, I’m assuming you know more than I do with this.
Little things like picking sounds and determining timings for various actions requires a lot of trial-and-error so you have to test it as you do it. Doing all of that through a QA team would slow down development very hard. Not to mention that I’m a hobbyist game dev and I don’t have money to hire anyone :D
I suppose I could always ask my friends to help me out with that… adding scheduling as another problem during development :D
BurntWits@sh.itjust.works 14 hours ago
Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, maybe you can playtest while you’re still developing the game, but once the game is ready to be played in full, you can’t continue to play it unless it’s for making updates or whatever. Basically you can only play it for the purposes of development, not for the sake of playing a game.
Or maybe you can’t playtest at all and you do everything blind and the end result is a chaotic mess, that could be fun too. But probably the first one.
Development hell never was so fun!