Its funny because during development sometimes people would ask me, "Did you have focus group testing, etc?". I would chuckle and say, "Yup, I have a whole department of 100 testers doing that!". Being an Indie developer is definitely way more fly by the seat of your pants. However if you are creative you can find some alternative solutions. We were very concerned about the game difficulty, was it tuned to hard? What we needed was some feedback from gamers... We contacted the Vancouver Film School and orgnaized game tesing with students in their Game Design Program. We set up our dev kits in VFS game Lab and had students each play the game for one hour. We gave students the controllers and basically just sat back, watched how they playd and taok notes. After the hour session we gave them a questionaire to fill out. One issue we mulled over was, "Are students in a game design program representative of the buyers of our game?". They are definitely a core demographic, leaning torward the "hard core" vs the"casual" gamer. I can't say I really have a good idea if they are. I do think Xbox gamers tend to be more "hard core" gamers. The students were really great in giving us good feedback and their response to the game was very encouraging. After 2 days of play testing I gave a talk/Q&A to the students...many of them seemed very interested in the business side of things.
