AUTHOR: Mike McGoveran
Date: 7/14/2023

The Problem

This week was quite the adventure trying to wrangle our testers.  While we were able to call in many friends and family to test our game,  harnessing feedback proved unexpectedly difficult.  About half of the individuals who offered to test the game never made an attempt.  Of the half that did  only 2 filled out our survey with the specific questions we needed answers to,  and only one of those surveys were on the correct version of the game.  The rest of the testers completely ignored the forms and prompts we put out and decided to give random feedback if any at all leaving very little actionable tasks for the whole team.

The Solution

Frankly, there was no reasonable solution for our game.  The only way we could drive people more aggressively was to implement a whole feedback form and system into the game itself to query the player on close.  Or instead take the time to sit virtually over the player's shoulder as they played directing them for the specific feedback we needed.. which is highly sub-optimal as we can only do that with 1 tester at a time. 

Maybe we are selecting from the wrong pool of people, but this brings about some interesting questions to consider in the future:
Do we integrate a feedback form directly into the game moving forward?  Do we hire professional testers?  Do we release games as Early Access so we get paying customers to publicly shame the game so we can get motivated critics?  I always thought feedback would be the easiest thing to receive as today's consumer is generally champing at the bit to express their opinion.  Guess I was wrong.