There is two types of testing. You did not specify which you talk about.
Testing for bugs. Traditionally, you do tests yourself till you are satisfied and move from alpha test to beta test and if you are confident enough, from beta to release. But this is not a value, like let's search x hours for bugs. You just test the game in hopefully all scenarios and eliminate all the bugs you can find, before any scheduled release date. For bigger titles, that got sloppy over the years.
Testing for balance and how the game is liked by the target audience. If you have no balancing, the answer is obvious. But you should still collect feedback by honest testers. Your proverbial mom probably is not unbiased. And while friends might be honest with you, they might not be the target audience, or might not be able to pinpoint what is missing or too much. If you can release a demo and have an audience, that is an ongoing process, and the art is to hear the valid critique, even if there are vocal minority opinions.
Trivially, the only person needed is you, and the time needed for testing is 0, because it happened while the development was happening. The other end is what you said, about never enough. To draw a line, you would need to have some type of constraint. Like a release date. Since we are on Itch, that's not an issue. If it was about bugs, just have a few playthoughs been done, and if there are no game breaking bugs, it should be good to go and not be ashamed to have status "released" instead of "in development".
Sorry, I didn’t specify that because I hadn’t even made that distinction in my own mind... 😅
In my case, after checking it myself countless times, having friends and family test it, and so on, I’ve had a fully playable online version for about a month now, precisely to iron out any potential bugs and get feedback on the overall impression it makes (whether players notice anything missing, or any mechanics that only work in my head, and so on...)
But of course, there’s no deadline for this; I still have quite a bit left to fix or improve based on what the testers have been reporting, but I suppose that when I’m done with this phase, if no one else has said anything, it’ll be time to move from ‘in development’ to ‘published’, as you say.
Just out of curiosity, what do you mean by ‘big titles have neglected over the years’? Fixing bugs?
Thanks so much for your comment, have a good day!
what do you mean by ‘big titles have neglected over the years’? Fixing bugs?
One often forgets the differences between indie games and big and bigger game studios. You question about testing is in my opinion not really applicable for an indie game project at the solo dev and hobby level. You do not have a publisher. A dealine. A budget and an expected return value. No profit maximization. You do not need to calculate a return value for testing efforts. Will you sell more units, if you pay for testing a week longer and delay release? Will you lose customers and reputation, if you release a buggy game?
As an inde dev you can just release the game as soon as you are comfortable with it. Or update whatever you think needs fixing.
In the early days, it was not possible to fix games. Not easily. If your game was on the physical medium, that was it. No way to fix bugs. Especially not on video game consoles. For desktop computers, you could release fixes and patches that people would be able to get on a cd when buying a game magazine. Or over the rare and slow internet, which would cost per minute. And that came even later for console video games.
The more easily you could fix a game after release, the sloppier publishers and developers got. Now there are games, you would not want to touch at all the first year after release, sometimes longer, because of the bug festival inside the game and to see if the developer would drop the game like a hot potatoe and leave customers out in the rain with a bug ridden mess that would never be fixed.
"Early Access" helped here a bit. But it is just shifting goal posts. When is a game worthy of "released"? As soon as you can sell it, or as soon as the developer is proud and need not be ashamed of all the bugs?
