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[bluhoney]

I am the lead admin for a beta testing community aimed at providing games producers both large and small with a stable and informed source of testing candidates without having to rely on lottery handout and the resulting poor levels and quality of feedback. We do this by directly promoting and rewarding those members who participate the most, and provide the most usful and accurate feedback.. these testers are supported through the site with any tools or services they might need to test the game fully

I'd like to make clear, I'm not posting here to "steal" memebers or advertise my site.. I have an already established community working away on testing games already.. last thing I'd want to do is deter the very developers I hope to be working with.

I'd like to offer my communities service to you all instead, as I believe that independent games can benefit just as much if not more from the feedback and testing my community can offer.

We are completely free to use for any small game developer and can provide:

- Quality feedback from our community of dedicated members with real incentive to provide accurate and concise details of any problems or bugs.

- Mirror hosting for any files/feedback forms/videos and other materials for games we are testing.

- Standard and customised feedback forms availible to ask specific questions and compile results into an easy reference.

- Section of the website dedicated to your beta including forums, video library, image library, public voice comms (if required), announcements and extra publicity.

- Clear testing rules and guidelines.

- Results pre-compiled into database/spreadsheet form or others based on specific requirements

and more features being added constantly to our lineup

If you'd like some more info or if you think we can help out your game then just drop me a PM or email and we'll get right back to you

Thanks for your time..

Jon Skinner
www.blackboxbeta.net

[ChevyRay]

Wait, what. Is this for real?

That's a pretty amazing service to offer for free; I find this suspicious, but intriguing at the same time. My games are so small-time that they'd never need such a thing, but there might be some developers who this interests.

Do you have an agreement or something that needs to be signed? If not, then is there some sort of requirement to be met? If it's as simple as just emailing you a download link to our game pre-release, then I don't know how well that would work out. There are literally hundreds of members in just these forums alone developing games for free; what would happen if too many decided they'd sign up for such a generous service?

Just curious If you're serious about this, then that's a mighty cool service you're offering there.



PS: The ski-jump shot in your introduction post was awesome! You ski much, then? If so, what country are you from and what hills do you often go to? Sorry :D I adore skiing.

[bluhoney]

Hey!

Indeed, it's for real... and I'll do my best to answer and worries/reservations - can completely understand this given how many people attempt to abuse the small game community.

So far we've had some good interest, but not enough yet to be actually turning people away - something I hope is as rare as possible, but may have to happen sometime to ensure we still provide quality feedback still. It does take a little more than just sending us a download link though, if we're to work on a beta then it's important that it's done seriously! By this I mean that it's important that we can actually offer something, and that the developer is truly after feedback and suggestions - not just a bunch more people to play the game.

Our first step is always for myself and a few others from my community to have a proper discussion with the developer about where help is needed, what the goals are for the beta, and where the "line" is drawn in regards to what level of feedback is acceptable. From that we can then get a proper idea of where to progress and what level of service we'll provide, be it just a basic bug test with some feedback forms - or a full site section and ongoing testing and suggestions for a early release beta or alpha.

It's hard to provide a definate "this is how it works" because we really treat each project individually - the only way to ensure that everyone stays happy and that the quality of both our testing services, and of the games we test remains as high as possible!

Thanks for the interest, if there's any more questions out there I'm more than happy to answer them

Jon Skinner

p.s. Thanks! I ended up quite bruised and broken that day but it was amazing fun.. that shot is from the snow park in Tignes last year, but I'm lucky enough to have visited a lot of the european resorts, mostly french and swiss (mmmm Verbier..). Sadly I'm from the UK, so my chances to actually get out there don't come nearly often enough.

[Captain_404]

Just from glancing at your site, it seems it's mostly aimed at well known titles, with the indie games addition being only recent.

So (I assume) you've already got some kind of system in place for testing large scale games, but how do you think that applies to testing the small scale indie projects? What do you see as major differences between the two, and how do you (or do you) accommodate for those?

[bluhoney]

Although the outward appearance seems very much focussed on well known titles, the practical goings on behind the scenes are just as suited to an Indie game developer, if not more so with lack of resources and time to do everything being common when making an independent game. The decision to cover well known titles on the info pages is simply one of interest, I must keep my community talking and active even when we have nothing current to test.. a difficult task, and only really possible by ensuring I cover the mainstream games that have large followings. By comparison, the indie community contains a huge number of fun titles, both complete and in production.. many of which will sadly never reach completion or have a fairly small following. Trying to put a complete and fair coverage of the indie community just by research would be a mammoth task, which for the moment I have to sideline in favor of actually getting some testing done and ensuring the community progresses.

We have just begun our latest project with an indie FPS game, which is why the indie side of the site may seem to be a recent addition.. already our relationship with the developers of the game is producing great results, and the community is really loving the extra interaction we've got dealing with this particular developer - something you only really see in the indie community. I'm hoping this will lead to a more natural source of independent information to the site, as should lead to having more people willing to approach me with news about thier titles.

As far as accomodation is concerned for the small scale projects, I believe the services we can offer could be of more benefit to a small developer than a large. The hosting services, info pages and much of the feedback system is geared to helping out those developers without the time, resources and people to easily manage everything themselves. Being able to "offload" some of that work elsewhere I would hope is a great benefit, allowing the developer to focus much more on the results of the feedback, rather than trying to collect it themselves. We are also working a section of the site specifically for developers, where they would be able to collect the lastest feedback information in a compiled format, make quick changes to thier feedback forms to prompt specific feedback, and use our karma system to reward those that the dev's themselves feel are being the most helpful.

There's a lot of differences between servicing the large scale projects, and an indie project.. with larger scale projects we are mostly bug testing, developers are looking for recurring problems, trends in reports, dxdiag output and other technical info and we basically provide a high download-to-feedback ratio and some streamlining via our feedback system. Although all this is also important for an indie developer, we find they are also much more open to more direct feedback on the game itself, what can be improved, added or changed to polish off the title.. for this we provide much closer moderation of the forums, and try to encourage a more open discussion of the game's styles and methods. This is of course based on what I've discussed above, discussion first with the developers to understand properly what they want to achieve from the testing, and therefore where we should be rewarding people and collating feedback.

Finally with a indie project we often need to enforce a more strict update schedule as changes come more frequently than on a mainstream project. For an example, with our current indie testing project sourceforge SVN is being used heavily, with a number of updates in place each day. To aid this those who use the SVN system regularly, and feedback based on that version (rather than the official beta version) are being rewarded extra for doing so.

I hope this helps explain a bit how we deal with a independent game, although I'm sure I've not covered every aspect or difference.. I'd be going for a while! It's important to note that we're always willing to learn and be taught - each project will be different after all, and happy to makes changes where appropriate to keep providing a great service.

Thanks for the questions