Next month will be the month in which the GoZen alpha comes out and I decided to stop accepting people for the alpha at the end of this month. I have my reasons for limiting the number of alpha testers which I’ll explain later in this post.
Before I talk more about this, I’d like to thank all people who already signed up for testing GoZen in such an early stage. I really appreciate it for wanting to invest your time in helping to improve GoZen.
Application deadline
The application deadline for the Alpha testing will be at the end of this month, March 31st. Will probably be in the morning for me somewhere (Japan time), so I can handle all new applications (if there will be any). The reason for why the deadline is at the end of the month is because the alpha will begin somewhere next month.
How to apply?
Applying can through two methods, first up is through this form: https://forms.gle/iyTvi7XD9Qm59vfF8, the other method is through contacting me personally on Discord. As an alpha tester having a Discord account is not necessary, but would be helpful in communicating and receiving feedback.
Why closing applications?
My reasoning for closing the applications for alpha testing is something I have been thinking about for a bit, as much as I would like a fully open alpha testing period, this will probably give certain issues.
My workload
As GoZen is mainly being developed by one person, me, I want to be certain that I can handle the workload which the alpha period will give. My last software I released, TeleDot, had around 10 people testing and that already gave a good amount of bug reports, feedback, feature additions and feature requests. The workload became quite high, quite quickly.
To put this into perspective, for GoZen we already have 30+ testers for the alpha. With half of them on Discord, and the other half through e-mail. Some of them don’t know how to use GitHub, so issue reports will become kind of a problem as duplicates will be made.
Negative reviews
If GoZen were to be a fully open alpha, chances of people without any info behind GoZen who will try it is very high. This means if they run into trouble, even though it’s an alpha version, they will complain or not want to use it anymore and just think badly of it which can influence more people. Maybe I’m wrong about this, but having thought about this, I feel more comfortable closing applications for this reason as well.
Things will break, it won’t work smoothly. It may be confusing at first and GoZen may go through drastic changes. Localization will be outdated by nearly every new alpha release, … Too many variables will cause people without a slight insight in GoZen and the development to get a negative experience.
Smooth experience
Last reason is mostly to give the people who are testing the alpha a clear chance and enough opportunities to share their feedback in an engaging community who are passionate about improving GoZen and are investing their time to make certain this will be a great video editor. I would not want people to have a negative experience testing GoZen and end up feeling not being listened to even though they have invested their time to create their feedbag and to find bugs which need fixing.
What is the Alpha to me
For me, the GoZen alpha is about the community helping to improve GoZen. This can be through many different way’s and its the main reason why I am publicly talking about the alpha to begin with. I could keep this among the members of my Discord server, but we need to get all kinds of people with different video editing experience if we want this to be an all around good video editor which is simple to use, but can become a powerful video editing experience.
A quick list of some of the points of what I am expecting from the alpha:
- Bug reports; (I want all critical bugs out of GoZen before the beta release)
- Feedback about the editor experience;
- Suggestions for changes or official modules;
- Compatibility + performance testing; (On what hardware can GoZen run)
Be quick
That’s basically it, if you want to apply or you know some people who want to apply, this month is your last month. If you apply for alpha testing, it should be because you actually want to test and help improve GoZen. If you just want to edit videos, wait for a beta release or for a Version 1.0.0.
