Allow developers and select players to play unpublished version of a game in Roblox Player

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to test unpublished games in Roblox Player. There are a few things such as TeleportService that won’t work in Roblox Studio. Also, developers might want testers testing their game for possible issues before updating it. The current way of doing it is to create a new game and publish it. However it is really boring to do and assets uploaded with the game explorer will fail to load. Not even mentioning having to change place IDs for teleporting and every frustrating thing to do like that.


My solution is simple. Ability for developers and select players/group ranks to play unpublished the game version in Roblox Player. There would be an option in the game settings for developers to add players and/or group ranks that can play unpublished version of the game (developers would always have that).

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If you have the permission to play the unpublished version, there would be a button like this in the three dots menu of the game’s page. Clicking it will launch Roblox Player but it would use the version saved to Roblox, not published. Servers that use the unpublished version would be invisible in the server list unless you have permissions to play the unpublished game as well. Same would be true for friends list, if you try to join a friend who is in the unpublished version and you don’t have access to that, it would fail to join.

Teleports in game will automatically teleport you to the unpublished version of the place you were trying to teleport to if you are playing in the unpublished version. That way developers don’t have to write any extra code for that (like you have to with private servers :slightly_frowning_face:).

If this is implemented it would be nice to have an API for this as well. Maybe game.IsUnpublishedVersion?


If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because I would no longer have to maintain 2 separate games just to let testers test the game before updating it.

31 Likes

I think it’d be really useful if developers could play the saved version of the game as a sort of “staging environment,” this way we can ensure maximum compatibility across devices and fix any bugs that we may not otherwise encounter in Studio before publishing the update, possibly due to irregular occurrences or multiplayer functionality.

Sometimes you only realise something’s wrong when you play on a live device, and certain features are not available to you in Studio, such as gyroscope or multi-touch controls.

Edit: Other possible solution on how to switch between live and development versions:


15 Likes

That branch icon brought up branches into my mind. It would definitely be cool if developers could create branches like on GitHub. Roblox would still create development and live branches by default and the “saved to Roblox” version is development and published is live.

2 Likes