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Hello everyone. I've just found this forum, and it may be just what I'm looking for. I've been hoping to find a gaming group or two who would be interested in playtesting a tactical space combat game that my brother and I have been developing for a couple years now.

I'd really love to find a couple groups who would be willing to give it a shot and provide feedback, and I've seen a couple threads here on Dakka where someone tried something similar and either failed miserably or succeeded to a great degree. I'd love to be in the latter category, so does anyone have any advice for how to best present a game to Dakka in the hopes of getting playtesters?

Provide plenty of information to get people interested in your game. Just start a thread on it- you might outline any goals, how long you want to playtest, what you want tested, how you want it, what you expect to provide the testers, and what you expect to get back from them.

As rough as this might sound, if you only have fluff designed for your game, I'd hold off until you have a foundation of the rules. Fluff without rules is pointless, and doesn't do much to actually help people on Dakka "like" your game. Gotta give us the foundation before you can sell us the house

To be real boiled down to the simplest terms, the best advice I have for you is that if you want playtesters to test your game; make sure you have a game to test.

This may seem like a 'well duh' sort of thing, but the biggest weakness and shortcoming I see from would-be game designers here and on other boards is that they focus only on the easy jobs of design, such as fluff or other tangential things. Now fluff is important in a game, but fluff is vastly easier to handle that mechanical design. With fluff, you do not need to ensure balance and that the math works out. With the rules and mechanics, you do need that all worked out. And I get that people are proud of their fluff, and that fluff can be very interesting, but it ain't gonna get you players.

And mechanics/rules are hard work. Very hard, and it takes a long, long time to get them right.

Let me ask you, what have you and for brother developed so far? Have you focused on rules, or fluff?

 curran12 wrote:
To be real boiled down to the simplest terms, the best advice I have for you is that if you want playtesters to test your game; make sure you have a game to test.

And mechanics/rules are hard work. Very hard, and it takes a long, long time to get them right.

Believe me, I'm well aware. It was over a year in development before even the core mechanics of the game started to settle down, and my game supplies are now littered with the detritus of many failed systems and subsystems for this game. I have a box full of nothing but purple dice from when we tried using dice to indicate shield strength for ships.

I've learned that it's actually very easy to make something that you can play and call a game (our very first iteration with crappy hand-drawn on scratch paper and precise numbers of crew in a component being tracked was technically 'playable'), and incredibly difficult to make something that is actually fun to play, but it's definitely getting there. The experience of designing Silent Fury has given me a much better eye for game design in general, and taught me some serious respect for game systems that do things really well.

Let me ask you, what have you and for brother developed so far? Have you focused on rules, or fluff?

The game right now is actually super-light on fluff (I have only a bare-bones concept of a universe largely run by corporations that became empires - I always mean to get around to writing more, but I figure there's time for that later). We've mainly spent our time on rules development and playtesting. We made a website if you want read the rules and such - www.silent-fury.com

The rules currently on the site are a couple iterations behind the current version (we're in the midst of developing V2.5), so I wouldn't encourage people to playtest that version, as a fair bit of it has changed. I'll see about updating the online rules / cards / ship sheets to 2.5 after Historicon (we're running two games there if anyone here is going and interested), then I'll come back with all that ready to go and see if you guys are interested in giving it a shot.

My best piece of advice, having seen a few of these threads before?

GRAMMAR. So many poorly presented game ideas end in flaming wreckage because of horrific walls of unformatted, misspelled text.

You've got that covered, so just get us the game!