Ramshead playtesting

[Tony Irwin]

I had never heard of Universalis until it was already a gorgeous little blue book with lovingly drawn, kooky fantasy art pics of robot pirates and laser artillery on lizard mounts.

Snooping around the Forge since then, I get the impression that Universalis was kept very tightly under wraps until it was ready to sell.

Robots and Rapiers, on the other hand, can be downloaded in full. And I mean full. It's a beast of a game, but all its many amazing ideas can be had for free (well at last for the price of an internet connection).

I was wondering why that was? Can you tell us your approach to playtesting and releasing playtest versions of your games?

[Bob McNamee]

I wasn't involved in any of the playtesting at the time, but there were a lot of teasing references in various places on the Forge at the time about Universalis.

If you go down to pages 6 and 7 of the Universalis Forum you will find a section of locked threads that contain the posts that were being made by the playtesters and designers during the creation and finetuning of the game. Ralph and Mike were kind enough to place them up for all to see. Its pretty interesting to read about the changes occurring as time went on.

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=2700 is one of the last of those threads before the published Universalis came out.

The full version was available for playtesting groups until published.

I imagine the Ralph will pull the test versions after Robots and Rapiers gets published in its 'final' form.

R&R sounds like  a cool game to me, in concept. I haven't had time to read any recent versions.

[Valamir]

Hey Tony,

No real plan actually, just kind of experimenting as I go.

With Universalis we had more of a closed playtest group in a hidden forum, although, as Bob notes its existance wasn't completely secret and membership was available for the asking.

With R&R I took a different approach.  For one I had a website that actually generated some traffic to host files at.  The Alpha version that's on the site is a fairly far cry from the Beta version at this point.  I will probably be sending the Beta out only by request when its ready.