Months ago, excellent partly-puzzlehunt-naive team Drop_Table was the (brave!) first playtest team of the Octothorpean Game. It took a long time to incorporate their feedback. The game has many, many puzzles. Thus, when there's a fix-it task that starts "For each puzzle, make sure…" it might take weeks to finish. There were several such tasks; I'd overlooked things that were stumbling blocks to a puzzlehunt-naive team. Fixing those took weeks and weeks.
(If I'd had a better idea of what I was aiming for, I probably could have run a simpler playtest sooner, after having created fewer puzzles. Then those "For each puzzle…" tasks would have been quicker. But I didn't know what I was aiming for; to figure that out, I just kept filling in content.)
Last weekend, excellent puzzlehunt-naive team WBYeats playtested. The lovely feedback was plentiful; but there weren't any every-puzzle-must-change issues or even forty-puzzles-must-change issues. Just a bunch of fix-one-puzzle or fix-the-UI-flow-thusly issues. I finished fixing those just now.
It feels like a milestone. It feels like this thing is at least roughly in the right shape now.
I can stop saying "No experienced playtesters, please!" Before, there wasn't much point fixing regular-playtester feedback: naive-playtester feedback was likely to change each puzzle so much that the relatively-fiddly fix-this-one-detail thingies were likely to get overwritten anyhow. But now I think I'm ready for the detail thingies.
I'm also looking at not-a-lot-of-unstructured-time in the next few weeks, so we'll see how soon I follow up on that thought. But this feels good.
