I wasn't expecting that in the beginning, but my family got super excited. Another exciting surprise was he also said EVERYONE in the audience would be picked at least once to participate since the show was highly interactive. I am not sure why they wouldn't have enough forms for all audience members to fill out prior to the show since they said it was so important.? No worries, though, the mentalist, when he started the show, declared the forms weren't necessary. Sadly, however, those forms were out too. He said he was out but I could fill out a form that was located near the stage area. When my husband arrived, I requested the form.

It seemed rude, but I thought managing others that arrived may be more important to him. He said, ' don't understand you' and walked away. I said absolutely but I was waiting for my husband. He said it was important I fill out a form to allow Banachek the ability to read my mind. Overall I think it went really well, so we are likely to do something similar for future games.When entering the show, I encountered Kent. This probably should be under good, but I have no way to verify it either way. In theory, we will get better reviews since the whole idea was to make a better, more polished game before release. It was nice that I didn't have to grant access to a private forum for anyone. Actually I'm sure it did both, but how many of each I have no idea. It could potentially have scared people away or encouraged them to join in. I'm really not sure if this was ultimately a positive or a negative though. I really liked having open forums for the beta. Without the beta, I still probably would have fixed many of the same bugs, it just would have happened during a private beta or in patches after release. In reality, although the release date shifted out, I probably didn't actually lose any time overall. The only bad thing I can really think of is that we shipped later than I thought due to the beta.

You need more players and more configurations to track down some things. This is one of those places that is hard to test as an indie. The game was pretty stable when the beta started, but I did squash a few crash bugs here and there. I suppose this could technically go into the neutral section, but Din's Curse is a better game with all of the new additions. I did expect to add some, just not this many. I ended up adding more new features than I expected to. I've actually had several people comment on it, so I think it was well received. I think it worked to give out a little recognition to people that helped out and is just kind of cool. I already keep a pretty good done list, so tacking on someone's name to each item is fairly easy. I really like how the credits thing worked out. This is extremely helpful and it makes multi-party discussions happen more often (not just me and whoever started the thread). This one didn't occur to me until we had actually officially released the game, but on day 1 of the official release we had a bunch of experts in the forums. We wouldn't have officially released that rough, but I think it is better now than it would have been without the beta. It started out fairly rough, but I'm much happier where things are now. I think the biggest benefit to the feedback was to the balance of the game. I've said this a few times, but I'll say it again our beta testers helped a lot and I'm very grateful. Also if you look at the change lists, you'll notice a ton of changes were from our beta testers. Right now there are 2,153 posts in the Din's Curse beta forum. Hopefully this will be interesting to our gamers and might also be helpful to other indie developers. Now that our beta / pre-order program for Din's Curse is over I thought I would write up some of my thoughts about it.

Banachek pre thoughts