Short-time Lurker

Welcome. I lurked for quite a while before finally joining a few weeks ago myself. Your game sounds really cool. Having 2 sons, 11 and 4, myself, I'd definitely be interested in checking it out.

You mentioned a Kickstarter being in the works a few months from now as well as having artists working on artwork already. But you also say you've barely play tested it. I would highly recommend thoroughly testing the game before paying artists to do any work. They might be doing work on aspects of the game you might change or entirely remove based on the feedback you receive. Test it with groups of people you know, groups of people you don't know, and like Poly and Quest suggested, blind play testers as well. I'm playtesting my first game now and the feedback has been extremely useful in refining the game. I have only recently started testing my game but I'm pretty sure it will take dozens if not 100's of tests to get it to a point that is ready to pitch to a publisher or put up on Kickstarter.

Also, I don't think you want to go to Kickstarter with prototype artwork. Designers here will tell you that your game should be almost complete in it's design and artwork. Kickstarter is basically a means to get the money to physically produce the product that is ready to go minus any stretch goals you decide to offer.

Good luck on the development. A family friendly FRPG sounds great.

To be honest – it sounds like you are a little too early to be buying art if you still haven't play tested the game with people other than a few close friends / their children.

I highly recommend also doing some market research and playing a few sessions of two of the most popular current RPGs for kids:
- No Thank You, Evil by Shanna Germain and Monte Cook, published by Monte Cook Games
- Little Wizards by Antoine Bauza, published by Crafty Games.

Some quick self-check questions you'll want to look at just to know how to structure some of your marketing and answer questions from potential customers:

What do you think your system does better than these games?
What do you think your system does worse than these games?
What does your system do that these do not?
Would someone want to own both your game and one of these games?

You don't need 12 prototypes... Just a game for 4 players and they play the game 3 times with different people. 4 x 3 = 12 players and their opinion of the game.

Is your game capable of having 4 players to play??? Or is it like everyone has their own setup and that counts as 1 player (Game Set)? You would get invaluable experience from those third-party playtesting groups. Some of the players even told us what the game reminded them of: a bit of "Race for the Galaxy" + Civilization + "touch" of Firefly.

And that was nice because it gave us more leads to pursue in terms of thinking of new expansions and "extra/bonus" material!

PM me and I'll send you her coordinate. Cheers!

To be completely clear, I am absolutely not advocating doing blind playtesting at this point. Blind testing is essential to do before you publish a game, but you can waste a lot of time (both your own and the valuable time of your playtesters) by doing blind testing too soon.

Testing with people you don't know, however, is really useful from pretty much as soon as you have a stable game. Getting feedback from people who don't feel they have to be nice to you is so important, and you would do well to find ways to let people know that they can (and should) be brutally open and honest with their feedback.

I also don't buy into this "alpha/beta" terminology. Everyone means something different by it, and as soon as someone starts talking in those terms we end up with a discussion about what the terms really mean. Instead of thinking of alpha or beta, maybe it's better to think about what you are hoping to achieve with any given test: are you testing that a mechanism works, are you looking for how engaged players are at different stages, or maybe you're trying to find if there is a first player advantage?

Good luck with making your game.

Guess I could have been clearer that those three groups of testers happen in that order. Test the game yourself and close family and friends until you have an MVP, Minimum Viable Product, or Prototype in this case . You don't want to waste strangers' time by playing a game that breaks quickly. Once you have that, then go to strangers and get them to play it and give you honest feedback. And go in each time with specific things you are testing for. Once you think you have an answer, even if it's only after half a play through, end the session and ask for feedback. No reason to keep going if you already know what you need to fix. Every playtest I have run so far has only needed two rounds for me to get enough feedback to make changes. (Those rounds took an hour but that was enough feedback in itself that the game was way too long) Finally, once you have the gameplay down, you write a rulebook and send the game out to blind playtesters to see if they are able to learn and play the game just from the rules without your input.