I spent most of Friday playtesting, and found so many little (and big!) errors that I didn’t catch by reading the text files, often related to sections getting skipped but also continuity stuff. Not to mention style stuff like repeated words in a paragraph that’s somehow harder to spot in the text editor.
I sometimes drag my feet on playtesting because I usually do it after drafting a chapter or big scene and at that point I just want it done… but I always regret leaving it and always find it incredibly valuable to knuckle down and do it.
It got me curious, how often do people here playtest your own work? Do you have a set timing of when you do it?
I usually playtest after each major milestone and before each testing phase. What that means is after I complete my first draft, I start play testing regularly.
I agree. Not only repeated words, but things like double quotations (“”) of which I found 8 in my last play test.
The biggest things a play test helps me with is figuring out missing page breaks and places for additional choices to be inserted.
Also, a biggie for me is to visually see how well my subroutines fit into my normal text files. Because I normally have my subroutines in different text files than my normal scene files, reading the files alone does not help in catching “fit” issues.
My issue is I can only do a few play tests at one time. After the 5th in a row, or so, my eyes start to glaze over on the earlier passages and chapters… which means I start missing things I don’t miss with fresh eyes.
I always leave at least 1 week for play testing before I begin my milestone testing with readers. This time, I left 10 days.
As I write my chapters, I do technically run a play test as they are completed too, but these runs are exclusively looking at continuity and flow… so they are rapid-click. I don’t include these in my official play test count, because they are not how I would play the game.
It is for the “I married a supervillain” project of mine, yes (I have more supervillain ones on the table), although the sketches are combination of two characters (I was testing multiple features at once).
When I need a break, am trying to fix something, want to see how something I did works, or otherwise just want to see how something goes. Less often if I’m in a writing flow, more often if I’m not (if I can’t focus properly, testing is easier for me than writing).
I don’t know if there’s a program that’ll let you keep the formatting intact while also letting you see tracked changes (word and Google docs love to “helpfully” autocorrect unusual formatting), but here’s the editing process that seems to work best for most ChoiceScript authors:
Write your choice set, chapter, or whole game however you can.
Run QuickTest and fix bugs until it tests clean, getting community help if you can’t figure something out.
Run RandomTest for increasingly large iterations. Search for things that shouldn’t be there like curly brackets, asterisks, double punctuation. Fix those.
When everything’s running clean, save yourself some typo reports by spell checking the piece. I find copy-pasting the code into Google docs and fixing any problems in parallel works pretty well.
Send the piece out for testing. Here you’ll get screenshots or detailed notes on most of the bugs you missed along with editorial comments about player satisfaction.
When tests are coming back clean and everyone’s happy, THIS is when you give it to the copy editor, giving them the power to make all necessary changes to the text portions, but leaving the code alone. If they see a problem they can’t fix or make a larger change, they should note where it is and what the problem is / how they fixed it. They’re basically the last eyes on the piece before it launches. This way, you’re only reviewing a handful of issues (hopefully) rather than 18,000 notes on comma placement or whatever.
Whenever I write a section of code, I like to paste it to the beginning to test it out because it’s way quicker. I usually playtest a chapter after I started writing the next one – so I’ll be writing chapter 6 and then playtest chapter 5 – because if the writing is too recent, I’ll often skim since I know what the words ‘should’ be.
Used to that pretty frequently when my WIP was short and sweet, but I’ve recently got past 300k words. Nowadays, I just have the IDE do some randomtests and quickly look over the results, just in case there’s something particularly egregious for me to fix.
I’m the opposite, I make daily (and sometimes more!) copies if I’m working on a big project, practically “save as” with the filename + date. Helps a lot if you need to roll back to an earlier iteration after you broke something and can’t figure out what it was. Granted, that’s probably my programmer brain, not my writer brain talking.
LiliArch, Eiwynn, and everyone, thank you for the suggestions and help with my editing comparison matter - I’m going to check those out, excited to see that there is a good amount of solutions. The plugin sounds nice as that’s where I do most of my coding anyways, though sometimes I install a plugin and then it abruptly stops working (I’m looking at you spellcheck plugin!) but yeah . . .
And yes, I am a huge proponent of backing up constantly. I usually do it via email, though I should probably put more on USB drives too, just in case, because I am paranoid about loosing progress or whole projects even.
As for the playtest question from HarrisPS, usually just before release; its not that I don’t want to playtest it more, its just that most of the games get so massive that to actually play it effectively myself takes a few hours, so I can’t really justify it till then . . . my newer projects, until they become long, I usually will playtest more often, as that takes less time . . . . I think someone had suggested moving the code segment to be tested to the begining and testing that and I like that idea, though I almost think I ought to then code a randomization block to hit all possibilities for the prot and game settings, and that would take forever, so Idk. Regardless, really love testing the games when I get around to it, as its still fun and amazing to see it all come together, bit by bit.
Here it is on the eve of my pre-beta test, and I have just uploaded the final copy to the new Moody site.
Tomorrow, I start sending the hosted link to everyone, but right now, it feels like the calm before the storm.
There will be undiscovered bugs, simple errors in grammar and spelling mistakes, no doubt.
I truly hope the new and returning readers both find the game enjoyable.
My imposter feelings are raging in my soul right now, and I am fighting to keep them from overwhelming me with self-doubt and self-hate.
I still have things I need to do for this first part … things like artwork, but the narrative, systems, and mechanics are all ready.
Tomorrow’s shared excerpt will be from part two of Patchwerks.
I have written over 65,000 words of the first draft of part two, but now that part one is in the final phases of testing, I can get down and dirty in this new material.
I think working on my writing for part two is something that I’ve needed for a bit.
What I’m hearing you say is that I need to get this 25k-word project that the client insists is fucking urgent even though they had it for two goddamn months before they sent it to me fast so I have free time to try it out when it launches.
Ah, well, that’s why I charge the big cents, I guess. (I do not actually charge the big cents. I charge the medium cents, if that)
The pre-beta test runs for a full month (5-15-24 through 6-15-24) and then I am sure there will be lots of wonderful feedback which will help me improve part one that I’ll need to address, but I will be happy to have you try it out when the WiP thread goes live.
I might even get a Tumblr page up by then too, but no promises on that.
I'm half-writing a scene where the MC's supervillain spouse's archenemy (loosely defined) crashes in and causes (unintentionally) the spouse's second-in-command (who was just minding their own business) to have a nervous breakdown, and the spouse just *loses it*
“Get that buffoon out of my sight before I do something I’ll regret.”
