Hi everyone, just a little history of development first of all, I’m currently in the alpha stage of development of my game, its an episodic story driven third person action game. I began working on the game exactly 10 months ago. And 5 months ago I posted a short pre-alpha demo of the game and I mostly got positive reviews and very useful feedback, it was up for about 2 months and had around 900 downloads without any real marketing. but the main purpose of the demo was for an application to Epic game’s Dev grant program, which I assume didnt go through but I plan on submitting a second application soon as my official announcement trailer is ready.
ATM I have most of the main game complete, just filling in the many holes in the campaign mode’s story and the game play mechanics. It should be ready for closed beta testing very soon.
So my question is how to does one go about doing closed beta testing? my pre alpha demo was a tiny chunk of the game that was freely available for anyone to download for 2 months, but for beta testing I’d like to upload a larger chunk of the game to a smaller number of more specific people that can really help with feedback so I can iron out the game and get it ready for launch. But I am concerned of things such as people posting reviews, videos & play throughs of the entire game without permission, which happened with the pre-alpha demo.
Salutations I Create Art!,
I’m afraid that there isn’t much you can do to guarantee that no one can record your game/post reviews.
What you would want to do is create a Non-Disclosure Agreement form that the user must sign before you’ll give them the download.
However such a form is only as strong as your ability to enforce it; if people don’t respect the agreement you’ll have to take action against them, which may not be feasible in many cases.
You can insert code that requires server side handshake to allow the game to run, and then if they violate shut down their copy. However they will already have violated by this point so it is not preventative.
Ultimately you’ll have to decide if running a closed beta promotion is worth the possible risk that someone would leak or not.
My only suggestion is to mark the game very clearly as unfinished so that even if they share a video of it, the viewer will clearly see an on screen indicator that the game is in development.
This is easily the best advice you’ll get as far as people sharing your in-development content without your permission.
Honestly, I would just let people share it. Actively tell them to share it, even. As an indie dev with an unfinished game (especially if you watermarked it as such), unless it is absolutely terrible the free promotion will probably do more to help you than hurt you. The game does look pretty good, so I think you’ll be good too.
As far as closed beta testing, I would highly suggest making your way through Steam Greenlight first, which will help give you a better idea of what Steam’s audience is looking for and what they’re likely to notice first about your game. It appears as though you’ve already made some attempt at this (in the Concepts section, anyway). Once through Greenlight, you’d then be able to pass out Steam keys to your testers using an alternate or demo app ID (pro tip: don’t give out keys on your primary app ID, because those people will then own your game post-launch). I think this really only makes sense once your game is at a certain level of quality and content, but where that line gets drawn is up to you.
Again, based on the nature of our sharing culture today, you’re probably best simply locking away or removing from the demo any content that is so unfinished you or your game would be embarrassed by it. If you know for a fact that boss on level 2 gets bugged every time, maybe you shouldn’t let beta testers play level 2 until that bug is fixed. Best judgement on this kind of stuff, as to what bugs can be ignored and what bugs would cause some entitled YouTuber to make a whole video about how bad your game sucks because he did that one thing you thought no one would ever do and didn’t understand he was playing a game still in development. But even if you leave the bugs in there, I think as long as you’re honest about what your game is, I think you’ll find this situation to be rare.
Good luck!
Putting a “watermark” on your HUD, that show’s it’s in Alpha and what build number is useful. Also, using Steam to give out the Demo keys is great advice.