Early game design and playtest

[dj_himp]

Hi,

We are creating an original card game and since we are in an early stage of the design, we need to playtest a lot with friends and family.
I've searched for board/card game engine and found BGA and I like it, so I decided to begin the development of the current prototype of our game.
The version is almost ready and now I'm wondering how can I do the playtest phase. We've test with the game designer to play the game with account studios but we only managed to play it with him logging in with one of my test account and me on my primary test account (for example nickname0 and nickname1).
As we want to spread the playtest to more people how can we achieve that. I've seen that there is a preproduction servers but I can't find usefull information on how it works.

Thanks

[fafa-fr]

Hi,
Unless I'm mistaken, you have to ask the admins to get your game on preproduction (sourisdudesert and Een). And you're right, it's the best way to test games with friends.
Good games

[dj_himp]

Great, thanks for the answer.
I will contact them when I'm ready.

PS: Do you know if I have to contact them at each version I want to push in prepoduction?

[DrKarotte]

I think the idea of BGA is to put complete, fully tested games online. The testing with the dev accounts is mostly intended to test if the code works fine.

Once the game is online every substantial change may break everything with tables running (turn-based) an cause trouble.

For your purpose the sandbox system may be better, but this is still not available / kind of secret.

[Victoria_La]

You can set different passwords for test accounts and give it to people, if you want to do real testing it has to be pretty much in production, controlled by protected group permission. Its all custom work and only admins can do that. Once its setup though you can re-deploy to
production yourself. Pre-production is not meant for play-testing of original games, but more for testing of games which are in production
already before pushing to production so you don't screw up existing games.

[dj_himp]

Thank you for the clarification, I will share my test accounts for playtesting.