I'm a gamer who ended up volunteering to help out on 3 or 4 software releases but I would like to offer some advice if you will take it. Because you aren't charging for HOO you have a great opportunity for making a really solid project and speeding development up by changing how you test the game.
Testing
1. You'll get lots of volunteers because everyone thinks that testing is the best part of development - but unfortunately it is alot of work and they rarely realise.
2. Getting a game ready for release is a long, tedious process - you rarely get to play a scenario/mission/level for enjoyment.
3. You are constantly testing changes by the development team, or testing the boring features hundreds of times like 'loading stores', 'ballast tests' or 'tacking to starboard'...
4. You spend the rest of your time verifying bugs reported by the community, like a rock out of place, or a flag graphic that isnt blowing in the correct direction.
5. Testers never get the praise and always get the abuse if something is not working properly. People never say, 'wow - i pressed "space" to enter a room and it worked'...or 'wow, the boat didn't sink when i turned to starboard' but the testers may have been weeks reporting and working with the dev team on that.
BUT!!!
HOO is in a unique position....
It's cost-free, a beautiful game, designed by people who love the subject matter and supported by an enthusiastic user community. For a dev team that does not care about revenue coming in you are in the enviable position of having a large community ready and willing to test your game and no reason to exclude them or to rely on a small team. Because you aren't selling it, I would urge you to consider not making the NDAs too onerous, and if possible exclude them entirely. My experience from testing is that if NDA's are not required, the volume and frequency of community testing reports is all a software company needs once they have someone to categorise and manage the community reports.
If you haven't got a plan in place already I would suggest you release the game in clearly defined stages
1) sailing
2) ship combat
3) FPS combat on land and on sea.
Make each stage open to the public and have 1 or 3 designated QA staff to manage the testing reports for the dev team and let them feed the info through.
Testing
1. You'll get lots of volunteers because everyone thinks that testing is the best part of development - but unfortunately it is alot of work and they rarely realise.
2. Getting a game ready for release is a long, tedious process - you rarely get to play a scenario/mission/level for enjoyment.
3. You are constantly testing changes by the development team, or testing the boring features hundreds of times like 'loading stores', 'ballast tests' or 'tacking to starboard'...
4. You spend the rest of your time verifying bugs reported by the community, like a rock out of place, or a flag graphic that isnt blowing in the correct direction.
5. Testers never get the praise and always get the abuse if something is not working properly. People never say, 'wow - i pressed "space" to enter a room and it worked'...or 'wow, the boat didn't sink when i turned to starboard' but the testers may have been weeks reporting and working with the dev team on that.
BUT!!!
HOO is in a unique position....
It's cost-free, a beautiful game, designed by people who love the subject matter and supported by an enthusiastic user community. For a dev team that does not care about revenue coming in you are in the enviable position of having a large community ready and willing to test your game and no reason to exclude them or to rely on a small team. Because you aren't selling it, I would urge you to consider not making the NDAs too onerous, and if possible exclude them entirely. My experience from testing is that if NDA's are not required, the volume and frequency of community testing reports is all a software company needs once they have someone to categorise and manage the community reports.
If you haven't got a plan in place already I would suggest you release the game in clearly defined stages
1) sailing
2) ship combat
3) FPS combat on land and on sea.
Make each stage open to the public and have 1 or 3 designated QA staff to manage the testing reports for the dev team and let them feed the info through.
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