How’d the beta go?
I thought I would share my thoughts on how the beta went. To start off what were my goals for the beta in the first place. Here they are in no particular order.
Identify ways to improve the game including finding bugs.
Share the game with a wider audience gauge people’s thoughts about the game.
Identify effective ways to publicize the game.
I felt that two of the three goals were met, and the third was not a waste of time, but wasn’t necessarily met.
First, identifying ways to improve the game and finding bugs. February was a busy month for me, I spent more than half of the month away from home on a work trip followed by vacation. So during the 29 days of February that Tel-AI-phone was active I only made 12 commits. Essentially that was how many times I pushed a new build to the servers. The majority of those were minor bug fixes here and there. I do however have a fairly large list of things I would like to implement in the coming weeks and months.
Second sharing the game with the world! Overall I had really good feedback from the people I shared the game with. As for people playing it without my prompting I had a little harder time. Half of all the games that were played during the beta were played on my account, meaning I was there and made sure everything was running smoothly. There was also a large number of games that were started but never finished. Some of these were due to a bug that existed when you host the game from a mobile device. The rest I’m assuming were from people who started a game out of curiosity but didn’t have enough people around to fill a game.
One more thought about the second goal. Sharing the game and putting it out into the world brought so much joy to me. I knew when I launched it that It was not perfect, there were bugs, the art is mediocre, the narration was cheesy and dry, and the music grated at my ears. All that aside, sharing what I had worked on for months was such a relief to me.
Lastly I don’t feel like I have found an effective way to publicize the game quite yet. I have been trying to post consistently on social media with mixed results. I am optimistic that the social nature of the game will inherently foster sharing of the game, but it will take a while for that to take hold.
That’s all for now. If you have any questions or comments please feel free to drop me a line at jacob@telaiphone.com.
Cheers,
Jacob Strong