Board Game Arena

It's hard to playtest some of the more complex games in Alpha because you don't know what to click on to do certain actions. Right now people can only make Tutorials for games in Beta.

I can understand that, but as a developer and alpha tester I disagree for 2 reasons:

1. Games during alpha may often change the interface or functionality, repeatedly breaking tutorials. This would likely take even more tutorial development time, and frustrate those doing it.

2. If someone is alpha testing a game, they should generally understand the rules and how to play it. Otherwise, how can they know if there are problems? Players unfamiliar with a game should wait until beta anyway.



However, if someone is very familiar with a game's rules, and still does not know where to click to do something, in my opinion that is grounds for either a bug report or a suggestion (in the bug report system) -- since the developer may want to improve that aspect.

I'd like to give a 3. reason:
In alpha games the user interface is always in English, which can be very confusing when the tutorial is later translated into other languages. Even in the current system (using beta games) the interface or parts of it may still be in English, which is a handicap for non-english users and a challenge for translators. In fact, I'd prefer if tutorials could only be made after the game was translated into every language - which unfortunately isn't quite realistic as well.

GTSchemer wrote: ↑01 March 2024, 21:28 2. If someone is alpha testing a game, they should generally understand the rules and how to play it. Otherwise, how can they know if there are problems? Players unfamiliar with a game should wait until beta anyway.

I agree about the tutorial waiting until beta (because as you say, it needs a stable version, same issue with translations), however I'll add my two cents about testing. People unfamiliar with the game can still find interface problems, game-breaking problems, and provide others with opponents. I think they might want to hold off approving it, though, particularly if it's a complex game.

What I do wish for Alpha is that every game had a link to the rules. I realize this isn't necessarily up to the developer; it just seems that nowadays there are a lot of games hitting Alpha without any instructions (side effect of brand-new games using the platform for kickstarters?), and I think it ends up hurting the game's approval process.