Hello gents, ladies,

My first post here, if there is a more applicable forum for this question then please let me know.

Assuming I am in the right place, I recently completed the first stage in my new game and am having great difficulty finding random play testers. So far I've done some posts on subreddits (gamedev/indiegaming/playtest) but have only received a handful of comments.

I don't have a budget to pay play testers.

I'm wondering if anyone has any past experience or useful suggestions on how to find some free play testers?

Thanks!

Hurlbz

Creating a Dev Journal here. Create a post that shows some game play either through screenshots or video and a brief description of your game and the ideas behind it, then end it will "Looking for some play-testers to provide insight and discover bugs."

You should have a handful or more testers with feedback. More than a few of us have done it this way.

You could post in the Indie Projects (Awesomesauce) or 'Your Announcements' to get some attention from people around here.

My personal approach would be to bring it as a specific series of questions (which could open up into more general feedback). If you want to playtest, surely, you have mechanics you are not too sure about: open a thread in the Game Design sub-forum and question your choice, what your options were, etc. Link to a build and see what people come up with as feedback. We have a lot of active people in the Game Design forums and many will provide generous feedback.

Orymus3 this is a great idea, i never thought to publish a specific design question and maybe in the process get some more general feedback. Besides which you are right there are a few "specific" aspects that I want the feedback on the most anyway. I'm pretty new to game development, so it's all a learning process for me. I just posted in Game Design here, hopefully I get some feedback in the near future.

Navyman, thanks for the suggestion of the Game Journal I will definitely be creating a journal in the near future. I actually plan to outline the whole dev process / marketing / publishing process on my website www.overbyte.ca and will be sure to share the info in my journal here as well.

Thanks again for the suggestions.