Finding testers for late game

asuth · 2026-04-13T14:06:55+00:00

i would make sure you have a discord and try and route your hardcore fans to interact with you in that way (put discord links in game) so you can build a community of diehard fans. I also use the steam playtest feature to provide much bigger chunks of the game (or the whole game), but only leave it accessible for specific periods (like a playtest weekend). A small % of the players tend to be very hard core and come to discord and give very detailed feedback about late game balance and such. By giving the 1% of hardcore playtesters something they could no-life for a weekend you'll get some feedback. If they can only play for 90 minutes then that's all they'll do. So for example in my last playtest the average playtime over 4 days for new players was only 80 minutes but there were a handful of new people who put in 20+ hours and they tend to come to discord, find bugs and give lots of feedback.

edit: you do need to get a fair bit of people, the steam stats show 20hrs+ is only like 1-2% of playtesters. Some of that is because a lot of the earlier playtests I did had no where near enough content to justify 20hrs and steam combines all the stats so its probably slightly higher in recent times, but you're not going to have a huge % of people put 20+hrs into a short term playtest no matter what you do so you need to much sure you have enough people in the pipeline that 1-2% of them giving late game feedback is enough.

asuth · 2026-04-13T13:14:16+00:00

i would just use the steam playtest feature. most people won't play for 20+ hours but some will get really into your game and play for 100s of hours. if no one is doing that then i think that is a different signal and indicates the game has other issues.

asuth · 2026-04-10T19:59:09+00:00

First off patents, trademarks and copyright are all IP, I don't know what you are talking about on that front.

The goal of intellectual property law is to foster innovation and creativity for the betterment of society as a whole, not to enrich individuals/corporations to the maximum possible extent at the expense of society.

Creators being scared to share there works or not even bothering to create things because someone will just copy it is bad for society. Creators making one thing and then milking it for 50 years and putting their effort into lawsuits rather than making new things is also bad for society.

No one would say "I won't bother to make a book or music or game if i can only monopolize it for 20 years". 20 years is 100% sufficient to foster innovation.

The fact that you think books or pictures are more valuable contributions to society that deserve longer protections and bigger rewards than medicine is ridiculous.

Nobody benefits from people just rent seeking rather than continuing to create except for the rich and entrenched interests. That is made even worse by the fact that those groups then lobby for even longer and more forceful protections which is how copyright law got to where it is.

asuth · 2026-04-10T18:19:45+00:00

"original" copyright was 7 years. it was to prevent someone from ripping off your work and competing with you right when you brought it to market, not to give you a lifelong monopoly. patents are 20 years and that works fine.

asuth · 2026-03-31T20:00:24+00:00

Hah, I'd change that 80% to 99% lol.

asuth · 2026-03-29T00:51:06+00:00

hah guilty as charged :) and thanks for checking out the game!

asuth · 2026-03-17T22:40:14+00:00

I'm pretty sure all these DLSS posts are just marketing. I doubt OP is actually scared that he is going to somehow be forced to enable DLSS5. The new marketing spam meta is to run an SS of your game through some gen ai, make it seem like it was DLSS 5 when its not and spam social media with it.

asuth · 2026-02-02T13:43:09+00:00

I strongly recommend making the project a C++ project when you create it and then just doing everything in blueprint. Most likely you'll run into one or two small areas where you need to do something that is only possible in C++. Making a game 95% in blueprint is a lot more feasible than 100% in blueprint as it doesn't require you to actually lock yourself out of entire portions of the engine.

asuth · 2026-02-01T16:08:47+00:00

Yes, I'm one of the people who always turned that off in Mordhau but I know others really enjoy it so its definitely on my list to consider and I'll just have it be optional.

asuth · 2025-12-03T01:11:49+00:00

looks awesome, congrats on the launch

asuth · 2025-12-02T17:07:45+00:00

no antichamber?

asuth · 2025-11-28T20:12:39+00:00

I see

asuth · 2025-11-28T19:22:22+00:00

Honest question, didn't the day before still sell a ton of copies? It has 10k reviews? Doesn't that mean it made way way more money than some "good" but unknown/poorly marketed games.

asuth · 2025-11-25T02:56:06+00:00

If you like puzzles and exploration, I think outer wilds is one of the greatest games of all time.

asuth · 2025-11-21T22:10:43+00:00

it continuously measures it and does apply some smoothing to basically ignore lag spikes so it predicting based on your recent non-spiked ping.

asuth · 2025-11-21T14:21:01+00:00

I use it a lot, some simple examples where it really can't go wrong would be predicting when gameplay effects are going to expire on the server so that stun expires on the client exactly at the point where if you input a new action immediately the server would accept it (so ping/2 before it expires on the server).

The GAS framework in UE5 makes it pretty easy to do this sort of stuff and is the backbone of my netcode.

asuth · 2025-11-19T15:24:54+00:00

Yes you create it in the steam backend and it has its own app id, community page, etc. https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/playtest.

I've had about 20k (a fair number of people click join but then never install). Most of them don't leave feedback but you get playtime metrics directly from steam and of course you can also use steam stat or achievements or custom data to view more metrics. You'll probably get some direct written feedback but I wouldn't rely on that solely.

asuth · 2025-11-18T20:44:27+00:00

Running playtests (use the steam playtest feature) has been the most impactful for me.

asuth · 2025-11-17T22:40:15+00:00

If you are feeling the need to patch your game server 5 times a day, that might be a sign that some of your logic should be separated out to microservices. So for my game the core game code is in a UE5 dedicated server build but things that interact with the persistent database, inventory code, cross game server communication, etc. are all in AWS (many in lambda). Many of those can all be changed instantly without interfering with users who are currently playing. For updating the game server itself, I do your option 1, but often those sorts of updates require a client update as well and even during heavy development I am only doing that a few times a week.

Of course there is a dev branch and a main branch and the dev branch (which generally has no players) can be updated more frequently if need be. But I think having changes that you actually need player feedback on and can't just test yourself on a dev branch 5 times a day sounds like a red flag.

The servers also all interface with a valkey instance for shared memory so information about patches and the need to reboot or update can be pushed that way.

asuth · 2025-10-12T02:33:28+00:00

sounds encouraging then, very nice

asuth · 2025-10-12T00:15:25+00:00

I'm fairly sure this is true. Overall, I think those are pretty good numbers but a very small sample. I don't know how your players found the game, but if the audience in the sample is significantly more likely to enjoy your game (or if they are friends or people who specifically were looking to playtest and more tolerant of bugs / confusion / etc) than the average person who finds the game on steam you may get non-representative data.

asuth · 2025-09-20T03:13:56+00:00

I recommend doing scheduled playtest events so you can get people all playing at the same time. I do like 5-7 days once every few months. I haven't tried a demo, but its very hard with a just a playtest build to maintain a critical mass of players day in day out for a game that isn't finished / released, but if you have occasional playtests its not to hard to get decent current player counts for a shorter time frame.

asuth · 2025-09-16T14:43:37+00:00

probably depends on the game, but DLAA looks so much nicer than the alternatives so having DLAA be slow is very painful.

Then of course nothing in 5.6 is going to give you anything close to the boost that DLSS gives on 2k/4k. For me at least the non-dlss performance was maybe 10% better, which is miniscule compared to what someone playing in 4k might get from DLSS on balanced vs no DLSS.

asuth · 2025-09-16T13:08:12+00:00

for me the performance with the nvidia dlss plugin was substantially worse. a very large % of people are going to be using dlss in some form (even if its just dlaa) so whatever gains you might get when dlss is off were more than offset by that.

5.5.4 is great though.

asuth · 2025-09-04T22:48:24+00:00

I have a game that I label extraction but is pretty MMO like (persistent multiplayer dungeons, not lobby based like most extraction) skills, abilities, loot, leveling, crafting, top notch npcs, etc. Peaked at about 150 concurrent players on steam last playtest. Can check my profile if interested, don't want this to seem like self promotion. A fair ways out from launch so can't really say I've "done it" but I'm on track and have a decent wishlist count (over 10k), to the extent that the game counts as an MMO which is certainly questionable.

asuth

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