This is a documentation for Board Game Arena: play board games online !

BGA game Lifecycle

З пляцоўкі Board Game Arena
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Studio Framework Navigation

File structure of a BGA game

Game logic (Server side)
Game interface (Client side)
Other components
BGA Studio game components reference
  • Deck: a PHP component to manage cards (deck, hands, picking cards, moving cards, shuffle deck, ...).
  • Counter: a JS component to manage a counter that can increase/decrease (ex: player's score).
  • Scrollmap: a JS component to manage a scrollable game area (useful when the game area can be infinite. Examples: Saboteur or Takenoko games).
  • Stock: a JS component to manage and display a set of game elements displayed at a position.
  • Zone: a JS component to manage a zone of the board where several game elements can come and leave, but should be well displayed together (See for example: token's places at Can't Stop).

Undocumented component (if somebody knows please help with docs)

  • Draggable: a JS component to manage drag'n'drop actions.
  • ExpandableSection: a JS component to manage a rectangular block of HTML than can be displayed/hidden.
  • Wrapper: a JS component to wrap a <div> element around its child, even if these elements are absolute positioned.
BGA Studio user guide


Here's a summary of the different steps you would follow when developing a game with BGA Studio.

Step How to reach this step What happened during the step?
Initial How to join BGA developer team? You can choose to join an existing team / create a new project
Assigned You choose a game You can start the development of the game
Pre-alpha You've started to write some piece of code You develop the game. During this phase, we can assist you with the framework and give you some pieces of advice.
Alpha You tell us that your development is finished "BGA review": we are reviewing your game and check if it respects BGA guidelines. If not, we will ask you (and help you) to fix them. See Pre-release_checklist to move to this step.
Private beta We give a "go" "Publisher review": On preproduction platform, the publisher, the designer, we and you can test the game together and separately. We help you to take into account remarks from the publisher and the designer.
Public beta The adaptation is approved by the publisher We find together a good launch date for the game, we announce the game on BGA news, and then player can start to play! During the first days, it is common that some bugs are reported by players, and you can fix them following the instructions in Post-release phase.
Gold The game is stable on BGA Congrats! You can still modify and optimize things following the instructions in Post-release phase.

See also