Hey! I've been staying up a lot of late nights and spending months-years on all of the games I put on NG, but it's very hard to improve or know what needs to change because nobody has really been reviewing them.

They get pretty okay scores, but I'm trying to aim higher. The last 2 hover around the same score (~3.4/5) despite the more recent project having a ton of improvements, adding medals, trying to gear it more towards NG etc, and it's hard to figure out why. Asking my friends to playtest only helps so much as they're not really NG people and they're my friends so we tend to like similar things anyway.

How do you guys get people outside of your friends to actually give feedback?

Most recent project here as an example, [any feedback on it would also be helpful but absolutely no pressure]

Maybe you’re putting too much stock in the NG score? Personally I find showing my games to friends is more fulfilling than whatever reaction I get from the internet.

As for playtesting specific feedback, I believe you can learn more from watching a biased friend play it IRL than the feedback of someone online.

I’ll try to remember to give your game a shot and leave some notes later

Maybe ask for people in game description if they are interested feedbacking your game?

It works absolutely for me.

And I agree with a post above.

Yeah, a big part of why i'm putting so much stock in the score is because it's the only thing I have to go off of in the absence of written reviews y'know?

And I did try asking people in the comments but it doesn't seem to make much difference. Also thanks in advance if you have any feedback! It really helps a lot!

Have you tried participating in any game jams? I've gotten way more feedback & learned a ton more from doing weekend long game projects in these events vs working for months/years on games and just putting them up somewhere.

The main reason is that (1) for a lot of game jams like Ludum Dare, you get guaranteed feedback from other developers who participated which tends to be constructive & insightful (or other jams where there is a dedicated series of judges with a lot of experience designing successful games who can give you honest advice/criticism). And (2) you get a lot more attempts to learn from these short projects.

For example, one thing I learned early on was that my games were too slow paced. They had interesting / unique gameplay mechanics but they weren't introduced until after a 5-10 min of gameplay, and a lot of players had quit by then. So it didn't matter how much time & effort I spent on content & polishing that nobody really got to see. Once I got this feedback in a jam, I tried improving it in the next attempt, realized it was _still_ too slow, did it again and got a little better and so on. It helps a lot looking at other submissions that were made in the same time frame / on the same theme and comparing.

I've thought of doing game jams, but most of what I want to do is building off of previous projects i've spent a good amount of time on instead of starting another unfinished thing from scratch, and entering something that i've been working on before feels kinda like cheating lol

That's the whole point of the game jam! To actually finish something, since it's easy for projects without a deadline to go on forever. If this is how you're feeling I highly recommend you give a game jam a thought. I had tons of unfinished projects and started finishing things a lot more once I started participating in these jams

Yeah you shouldn't do that. But nothing wrong with building off ideas or mechanics you've done in the past. Like if you've made a game in a genre and you know how to code all the things, you can probably remake the interesting bits from scratch pretty quickly/you're allowed to re-use generic code like stuff for UI and physics etc for most jams