2 hours ago
Hi, It’s been three weeks since Lava put out a call for beta testers for the new expansion, and I volunteered right away—the idea of testing the project really appealed to me.
There were four of us in the end: a guy in Canada, one in Germany, a woman in the UK, and me. The goal was to test the same sections at the same time so we could compare our immediate feedback—like, really in real time, not each of us on our own with a report three days later. Except that coordinating that across four different time zones and constantly changing schedules was an absolute nightmare. Between the guy who works mornings in Canada and me, who’s only available in the evenings after my freelance days, we wasted a whole week just trying to find a common time slot. So I ended up using a calendar-syncing trick I found in an old thread on my animation forum, which was originally meant for coordinating watch parties across time zones.
Basically, it’s a shared spreadsheet where everyone lists their available times converted directly to UTC, and we schedule the sessions based on that instead of sending messages back and forth. We still managed to organize two weekends of group testing, and we were able to compare our feedback on the same scenes in real time, which really helps when it comes to spotting bugs or weird stuff in the dialogue. How do you handle organizing group testing sessions or beta tests when people are spread across multiple time zones?
There were four of us in the end: a guy in Canada, one in Germany, a woman in the UK, and me. The goal was to test the same sections at the same time so we could compare our immediate feedback—like, really in real time, not each of us on our own with a report three days later. Except that coordinating that across four different time zones and constantly changing schedules was an absolute nightmare. Between the guy who works mornings in Canada and me, who’s only available in the evenings after my freelance days, we wasted a whole week just trying to find a common time slot. So I ended up using a calendar-syncing trick I found in an old thread on my animation forum, which was originally meant for coordinating watch parties across time zones.
Basically, it’s a shared spreadsheet where everyone lists their available times converted directly to UTC, and we schedule the sessions based on that instead of sending messages back and forth. We still managed to organize two weekends of group testing, and we were able to compare our feedback on the same scenes in real time, which really helps when it comes to spotting bugs or weird stuff in the dialogue. How do you handle organizing group testing sessions or beta tests when people are spread across multiple time zones?