First steps with BGA Studio

Connect to the BGA Studio website

Go to BGA Studio website: http://en.studio.boardgamearena.com

Choose one of your 10 accounts (ex: myusername0), and login into the website - as you would do for Board Game Arena.

Check projects in progress and available game licences

On the left menu, you can check game projects under development and available game licences. From this point, you can choose what you want to do:

• Join an existing project.
• Create a new project.
• Try to get a licence for a game you don't see in the "available game licences" page (see how-to on "available licences" page).

Connect to your SFTP folder and to the BGA Studio website

After your account has been created, you will get by email:

• the name of the SFTP server to connect to
• your SFTP login and password
• ten BGA Studio logins ending with a numeral ranging from 0 to 9 and the password needed to use them.

Using this information:

1. Connect to the SFTP server using your SFTP login and password, through your favourite SFTP client software (such as WinSCP for example)
2. Check that your home folder contains one folder for each of the three example games (reversi, hearts, gomoku). Each time you create a new game project, one additional folder is added to your "home" folder.

1. Open the resources.html file, it contains  :
   • The URL pointing to the BGA Studio website (protected with an HTTP Basic authentication scheme, the login and password are also referenced in the 'resources.html' file
   • The URL pointing to the BGA Studio backoffice (please note that you must first be logged in on the BGA Studio website to be able to access the backoffice, as the authentication is shared between the two)
   • The URL pointing to the web administration tool for the BGA Studio database.
2. Click on the URL to the BGA Studio website, enter the HTTP Basic credentials when prompted for them (and have your browser conveniently memorize them for you). Then you get to an home page just like the one of the main BGA website. Enter one of your ten BGA studio logins to connect as a user.

Launch your game and check how to update it

1. Find your game in the 'Play now' section and launch a table
2. Use the 'I want between X and X' players to tick down the maximum players number to the minimum
3. Click 'Express start': your game launches with the maximum number of players specified. It shows an empty canvas: in the game zone you just have a sentence 'This is your game interface. You can edit this HTML in your ".tpl" file.'.
4. Switch to your SFTP home folder, go into your game folder. Edit the game_game.tpl file, and change this sentence to 'Hey, this is my first game!', then save.
5. Go back to your browser and refresh, check that the game zone has updated.
6. Click on the 'Exit game' icon on the top right, and in the popup choose 'Express game stop'. The game ends automatically and you are brought back to the table screen for this ended game.
7. Switch to your game folder, go into the img folder and overwrite your game_box.png file with another image.
8. Go back to your browser, empty your browser cache, then refresh the page, and check that the game box image has been updated.

Commit your changes

Committing uploads your changes on our revision control system. This is an extra assurance not to lose your code, and to have the possibility (by asking BGA administrators) to get a previous version of your code if you need to backtrack. It also helps us to follow your progress (we get an email when you commit). So you should commit from time to time, when you hit some landmark in your development.

Here is how to go through your first commit:

1. Go back to your browser tab showing the 'resources.html' file. Click on the URL pointing to the BGA Studio backoffice (do not log out of the BGA Studio website before doing so, or you will get a Not authorized error message as the authentication is shared);
2. Click on the 'Sources' menu entry to show the commit form. Enter your game name (under the same form as the name of your game folder: lowercase, no spaces), enter your commit comment (such as 'My first commit') then hit the 'Submit' button;
3. Check the log for errors, it should end with the following lines:

 Transmitting file data .
 Committed revision #revision number#.
 HAL says: done.

NB: you should also commit each time you make a change to your gameoptions.inc.php file or to your stats.inc.php file, as an extra deployment action is needed from us for these files to take effect. Please mention in your commit comment that you need us to deploy those files, or send us an email to ask us to do so.

That's all!

Now you know about the basics of updating your game on BGA Studio and testing your changes.

For more information on the specificites of each file, please check out the reference documentation for the framework.