Playtesting, Discord, and More (Patreon)

Greetings!

I've mostly been working on writing and the dungeon this week. The renders are still rendering; I expect that'll continue for a few days. Going over the finished ones, I already think I'll end up tweaking and redoing a couple more, but I'll wait until they're all done before making a final decision.

Testing

Up to this point, the only testing I've done on releases is a brief playthrough - usually using the game editor's built-in playtest feature. This makes it quick and easy for me to fix the bugs I catch, but can lead to me missing problems (like many of the 'file not found' crashes that plague my initial releases). This approach has worked fairly well up to this point, but I think it's time to start implementing honest-to-goodness playtesting and bug testing. I have a few reasons for this:

It will allow most patrons to play bug-free releases, giving them a more enjoyable experience and keeping them from wasting time on unintended problems

Now that I 'm writing custom plugins for TPE, there is a greater potential for game-crashing bugs

It would be helpful for me to get feedback - particularly on gameplay - before finalizing releases

The upshot is that I'm going to try to get a group of playtesters together. Hopefully some of you will be interested! If not, I might have to expand my search beyond patrons, but I'm sure I'll be able to find a group somehow.

As I was thinking about the logistics of how to implement this, I realized that Discord would actually be perfect. So I will be making a Discord server after all! At least initially, its main purpose will be to facilitate testing, but depending on the level of interest I may expand the number of channels.

This isn't a promise, but I hope to have a trial version of the dungeon up for testing by this time next week. I'll probably have info about the server up a few days before.

Thank you for your support, and I hope some of you are interested in testing!