I'm an indie developer in every aspect of the term 'indie', I'm not against working in a team, I love it in my day job but unfortunately there aren't many software developers in this town and even less available to sit down with me and let me bounce ideas off of them.
Sometimes being clever isn't enough, software is a marketplace where perspectives matter and getting as many perspectives on your product before dropping your MVP (minimum viable product) on the public is what can make or break your product releases.
So what can you do if you are like me and don't have people who can sit down and talk about your products readily available?
Beta testing!
It's not uncommon to perform beta tests within your small development group and yourself following good TDR (Test Driven Development) but there is so much more to a good product release than finding bugs, you need to find issues with your UX (User Experience).
How do I do a closed / public beta?
- Pick a distribution platform - iOS has limited ways to you can beta test but if you have a way to collect UDIDs from potential participants then adhoc distributions are not that difficult and don't put too much stress on the participant. You can give them this website to make instructions easier. Look at other options as well, Test Flight has received good praise.
- Get analytics - You can't rely on your beta testers to give you feedback, especially if you have never met them. Use a service like parse to feed back useful data such as how many levels were completed in your game, how many retries, how many error screens were presented, etc.
- Add a dummy payment system - In-app purchases need to be tested too, when designing your store kit classes be sure to implement a way to set a boolean switch for test mode where it can allow purchases separate to the actual store kit. Use compiler #if statements to make sure the code can't be manipulated in release.
- Let the participants give you feedback - What I like to do is set up a form in google documents stored on my google drive. You can make fairly detailed forms, make them public and then see all the background data collected in a nice neat spreadsheet without spending a cent. Then pick a logical point in your game (such as at the end of the final level or after 20 attempts to then ask them if they would like to provide feedback and send them to the form. This is important as you are narrowing down the feedback to people who actually played the game to a specific point.
- Ask for more feedback - In addition to the above, have a separate form for bad experiences. Measure the number of memory warnings, error screens, crashes, levels failed and then ask them if they would like to submit a bug / issue report. You will see this data in your analytics but its important to get the direct opinion of the user as well.
Hope you find this useful and is enough to get you started. Don't fall in to the "I know everything" trap.