Playtesting Your Design
Start a playtest on your merged design and take actions one at a time as a new player would.
Playtesting Your Design
Playtest lets you play your design as a brand-new player, one action at a time, and see exactly what each action changes — the quickest way to check that your systems, custom operations and events behave the way you intended. Open it from the Playtest tab in the header.
What Playtest Plays
Playtest plays your design as it is on Main: "Playtest runs a commit on main — not your unsaved edits, and not a workspace." Merge your workspace before you play your latest changes. Nothing is deployed and no real player record is created.
If nothing has been merged into Main yet, Playtest shows "There is nothing to play yet" — merge a workspace and try again.
Step-by-Step Breakdown
Step 1: Open the Playtest Tab
Click Playtest in the header. The start screen reads Play your design.
Step 2: Choose What to Play
The Playing picker chooses which merge of Main to play. Latest — the most recent merge — is selected for you; earlier merges are listed with their date.
Step 3: Start a Playtest
Click Start a playtest. You begin as a brand-new player, so anything that happens to every new player has already happened — the GameSetup system, for example, has already run.
Step 4: Take an Action
The Next action panel lists every action a player could take:
- custom operations that are Callable by game clients, marked Custom operation;
- events that are Callable by game clients, marked Event · drives state machines;
- achievements your game can unlock directly.
The actions are grouped by whether they can run right now:
- Available — the action's conditions pass. As the panel's help puts it, "Available" means the action's condition holds — not that it will do what you expect.
- Blocked — the action's conditions don't pass. You can still play it, to see it refused.
- Undecidable — "We could not evaluate the condition from the client. The runtime may still accept these."
Click an action to play it. When an action moves a system, it shows the system's current state and where it would go, e.g. Main Quest · Chapter 1 → Chapter 2. Hover it to see the system's map and which exits would be taken — this is a prediction: the changes the action actually made appear in the next turn.
Step 5: Keep Playing or Start Over
Keep taking actions to play through your design. Start over begins again as a new player, and End session returns to the start screen. Neither asks for confirmation.
Tip: Your playtest stays open while you switch to other tabs and back, but reloading the page ends it.
Next Steps
Continue to Reading a Playtest to understand what each turn changed.