Pre-release checklist

Studio Framework Navigation

File structure of a BGA game

Game logic (Server side)

• Main game logic: yourgamename.game.php
• Your game state machine: states.inc.php
• Game database model: dbmodel.sql
• Players actions: yourgamename.action.php
• Game material description: material.inc.php
• Game statistics: stats.inc.php

Game interface (Client side)

• Game interface logic: yourgamename.js
• Game art: img directory
• Game interface stylesheet: yourgamename.css
• Game layout: view and template: yourgamename.view.php and yourgamename_yourgamename.tpl
• Your game mobile version

Other components

• Translations (how to make your game translatable)
• Game options and preferences: gameoptions.inc.php
• Game meta-information: gameinfos.inc.php
• Game replay
• 3D
• Some usual board game elements image ressources

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

• BGA game Lifecycle
• First steps with BGA Studio
• Tutorial reversi
• Tutorial gomoku
• Tutorial hearts
• Create a game in BGA Studio: Complete Walkthrough
• Tools and tips of BGA Studio - Tips and instructions on setting up development environment
• Practical debugging - Tips focused on debugging
• Studio logs - Instructions for log access
• BGA Studio Cookbook - Tips and instructions on using API's, libraries and frameworks
• BGA Studio Guidelines
• Troubleshooting - Most common "I am really stuck" situations
• Studio FAQ
• Pre-release checklist - Go throught this list if you think you done development
• Post-release phase
• BGA Code Sharing - Shared resources, projects on git hub, common code, other links

If you think your game is ready to be reviewed by by BGA admins and/or Publisher please consult this checklist first

• Metadata and graphics
  • Game_meta-information: gameinfos.inc.php has correct and up to date information about the game
  • Game box graphics is 3D version of the game box (if available) and publisher icon is correct (see Game art: img directory). Space around the box has to be transparent, not white.
  • There is no images in img directory which are not needed anymore
  • Multiple images (i.e. cards) are compressed in "Sprite" (see Game art: img directory)
  • Each image should not exceed 4M
  • Total size should not exceed 10M, image compression should be used otherwise
• Server side
  • Game progression is implemented (getGameProgression() in php)
  • Zombie turn is implemented (zombieTurn() in php). Note: it can only be tested if you explicitly click on the quit button to create a zombie. If you are expelled it does not generated a Zombie.
  • You have defined and implemented some meaningful statistics for your game (i.e. total points, point from source A, B, C...)
  • Game has meaningful notification messages (but don't overkill it, more user logs will slow down the loading)
  • You implemented tiebreaking (using aux score field) and updated tiebreaker description in meta-data
• Special testing
  • Game is tested with spectator (non player observer)
  • Game is tested with in-game replay feature (by clicking on notification log items)
  • Game works in Chrome and Firefox browsers at least. Also very recommended to test in IE 11 and Edge.
  • Game works on mobile device (if you don't have mobile device to test at least test in Chrome with smaller screen, they have a mode for that)
  • Test your game in realtime mode. Usually people will run out of time if you use default times unless you add call giveExtraTime($active_player_id) before each turn
  • Test your game in 3D mode
• Cleanup
  • Remove all extra console.log from your js code
  • Remove all unnecessary debug logging from your php code
  • Copyright headers in all source files have your name
• User Interface
  • Review BGA UI design Guidelines BGA_Studio_Guidelines
  • Non-self explanatory graphic elements should have tooltips
  • If graphic elements appear in notification log they should have titles (i.e. title attribute of div) so can be read in non rendered form (i.e. as text only)
  • Strings in your source code are ready for translation. See Translations
  • A prefix for example a trigram for your game that you append to all the css classes to avoid namespace conflicts, i.e. vla_selected vs selected
  • If you are looking for advice on design and some 3rd party testing you can post a message on the developers forum, and ask other developers, there are a lot of people who will gladly do it.
• Finally
  • Create a build for your game from the "manage game" page and check the log to make sure that everything builds fine (very often the js build fails because of this constraint).
  • Send an e-mail to studio@boardgamearena.com asking to move the project forward for review. You cannot deploy yourself from the "manage game" page until a first deploy has been done by the admins.