Bay Area folk: Sign up to be a SBCG4AP playtester!
Emily
Telltale Alumni
If you live near our San Rafael, CA office and would like to throw your name into the hat for Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People playtests, please make your wishes known. We hold a playtest a few weeks before an episode is finished. Often, pizza is served.
Also, tell your friends!
Update: 102 playtest coming soon, so if you're local and would like to participate but haven't submitted your name yet, please do!
Also, tell your friends!
Update: 102 playtest coming soon, so if you're local and would like to participate but haven't submitted your name yet, please do!
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Comments
Is Sacramento considered out of reach? Its not that far of a drive. I would love to attend if others don't take priority. (and its not held at 8am or something insane)
I'm not local, but SF isn't local to SR in my opinion.. its like saying Sacramento is Marysville (its not yet every year warped tour is held in Sacramento's Sleeptrain...residing in Marysville)
I filled out the application anyway but I was just wondering how far you will go out. If just local you should say that on the application (MUST BE LOCAL)
the forum was the first time I saw SF residents was needed.
I've gone in multiple times and I live in Davis. You'd just have to tack on another 10 miles. They have yet to lock the doors when I arrive.
Edit: It usually takes me 1 and a quarter to 1 and a half hours to drive in. It's usually on a Saturday, so the traffic isn't bad at all.
That seems fair. You know what I would call a build distributed outside of your office before release?
anyway, next time you do the testing thing, could you notify me maybe a half year beforehand? i can then file a vacation request on time..
That's not quite the purpose for a play test. It's not testing in the sense of bug hunting and reporting. A play test is our chance to have people approach the game with fresh eyes and tell us how it plays. It's for us to figure out what works, as opposed to what breaks.
For this, person-to-person communication is needed both individually and in a group setting. We want to have a conversation with the people who play the game and figure out what works and what doesn't. For this very reason, play testing is done on-site.
Not enough game developers do this.
Fix'd.
Wait... damn... you win this time! *shakes fist toward sky*
TMAP (a testing standard our company uses, don't know if it's known outside of Europe) calls this method "ghosting". Testers (and sometimes we developers too) would watch people use the software, and see how they respond to it, and how they use the GUI.
It's not often used, but very insightful.
--Erwin
@seg: the playtesting you do at the moment seems to be definitely working and having a few people onsite, so you can talk to them in person, is probably the best way to do it, but that doesn't mean you couldn't also do online-tests. of course this is completely theoretically...but, since telltale has quite a few international cutomers, wouldn't it be interesting to know how they react to a game beforehand? some jokes just don't work for other cultures..
For the case of Wii titles, it requires special Wii hardware in order to play the Wii version. That blows any chance of remoting it right there. But playtesting isn't about sending someone out to play the game and report back the results, it's also observing the player while they are working the project. It's a lot better to have people on-site. While granted it would be nice to include a wider cross-section, the technology hoops to allow remoting hinder the goals of playtesting. I should mention that the world really loves the Sam & Max yet we still playtested in English at our studios.
Playtesting is actually very common in the games industry. It's just not very common that the studio makes a casting call on the internet publicly. As an example, Harmonix was all about who you knew. To get into a playtest was for someone who had done it prior to bring a guest.
Heh. When I was playtesting 201 (I think it was that) and I was
Hehe, yeah swearing always helps in software development. On my machine, cursing is setup as a macro. I think "barbara streisand" is setup as Shift+F11
Do you think Comedic timing still has a technical component in editing that might be worth adjusting per audience reaction?
Nah, that's intuition.
I imagine that if a bunch of people specifically call out a scenario that isn't reading, it would be addressed, but successful comedic timing is usually up to the discretion of the choreographer responsible for that scene (and the writers). Like, as in, making sure a joke times out well is part of their job when putting together dialog scenes.
Says what I was trying to say more succinctly.
Really, was fun as usual. Good to see folks again and meet new ones. Scott you're pretty much as amped in person as you are on the net, and that's something when you're at work at 6pm on a saturday.
Considering that this doesn't tell me any new info, except that you liked what you played (which isn't as revealing as say, any type of Spoilers), I don't see that as breaking the NDA...
...Then again, I'm not a lawyer for Telltale, so...
Our lawyers will be at your door within the hour. Don't try to leave. We will find you.
I was very neutral and tepid about what I may or may not have played.
...ambiguous.
I had fun too :P
(Kal runs and dives into the nearby bushes!)