About Playtesting

Deathworks on 2007/08/27 17:42 of Deathworks

Hi!

I have dared and registered for the challenge. Let's just hope, I will really be able to follow K.I.S.S. and come up with something I can finish :) :) :)

Anyhow, I don't have any friends for playtesting and I only have my own Windows XP machine to test things on.

Therefore, I would need some help with playtesting.

Would it be possible to use the upload here and then diaries to handle it?

To make matters worse, I am going to visit some relatives over the weekend around the 9th, so I will have to finish the game and everything by Thursday morning. So, playtesting would probably be possible only from Monday and Wednesday (if I can get something running by Monday :) :) :) ).

Deathworks

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Comments

viblo on 2007/08/27 19:13:

I suggest you go to the pyweek irc-channel, #pyweek @ freenode.net. That way you will (hopefully) get instant feedback.

Tee on 2007/08/27 19:39:

The IRC channel as viblo suggested is great to find testers. But uploading it here and posting about it also works.

Deathworks on 2007/08/28 08:42:

Hi!

Thank you for the tips.
I think I will stick to the uploading and posting though, since IRC is some kind of chat, right? I am not really the chat person and I don't think that would really work out (I am online only for two or three periods of one or two hours each day).

I guess the best strategy would be to start with the programming and doing only minimal/simplified graphics as needed, have things playtested and create the proper graphics as the final step (it should be unlikely that replacing graphics would suddenly create bugs in a game).

Anyhow, thank you for the advice. And I really hope I can get something together worth sharing.

Deathworks

RB[0] on 2007/08/28 13:32:

A suggestion for your graphics: make all of the file-names small-case, as some systems are particular about those(especially linux), and if you decide to add the graphics at the end, and you accidentally name one of them with say a big "X" instead of the correct small "x", it may still run on your machine but on linux it will crash, so keep them all small so that you know you won't get any bugs that way :)

I don't know how many times that happened to me, and then I had to spend hours searching to find a fix, and that was when I knew there was a problem ;)

Deathworks on 2007/08/28 14:38:

Hi!

Thank you for the advice. Since I really only have Windows experience as far as IBM compatibles are concerned, I wouldn't know what to look out for.

But one question, do you mean that Linux doesn't support capital letters in file-names at all, or do you simply mean that Linux is case-sensitive about file-names? Sorry about the newbie question, but since you already said so much, I could hardly resist (^_^;;

The thing is, I like to capitalize the first letter of file names (sometimes). So I was wondering whether that was a portability hindrance.

Deathworks

allefant on 2007/08/28 15:34:

Linux is case sensitive, but Windows users usually do things like: bitmap.load("sprite.png"), but name the file "Sprite.png" - and already it breaks. Therefore it really is best to keep everything as lower case for portability's sake.

RB[0] on 2007/08/28 15:47:

you can use caps, but you have to make sure you load them as "FileNameWithCorrectCase.txt", like allefant said, it does look nicer to capitalize the words, etc. but it would be better if you used underscores, at least then you know it won't break under linux.

gcewing on 2007/08/30 03:58:

Perhaps the Skellington could include some utilities for opening files, loading images, etc. with enforcement of case-sensitivity. You'd still have to remember to use those routines, but it might help prevent case accidents for people who don't have a case-sensitive system to test on.

illume on 2007/09/01 04:11:

Just be sure to upload your game as you make it during the week. That way people with different platforms can download it and try it out. So you'll quickly get bug reports early on :)

Deathworks on 2007/09/01 08:49:

Hi!

Thanks again for all the responses.

I figure I will start with programming the code and creating the minimum content and basic graphics (or even graphic skeletons at first), so I can have people test whether the code runs on their machine while I draw the proper graphics during the second phase and embellish the content, not messing around with the programm code at all, except for rare cases where it may be needed. Thus, I hope that things will somehow work out (^_^;;

But I am still really nervous about this - while being really excited about it at the same time :) :) :) :)

Deathworks