Testing games on mobile is difficult for the following reasons:
- Studio emulator is inherently limited, and based on my past experience cannot be relied upon to accurately test a game, so most testing needs to be done using the mobile app.
- No multi-touch touch support. PCs can’t emulate multi-touch well. Best we could get is something like manual control over each touch location and begin/end state where we could somehow switch between different touches without affecting input state. But this is kinda janky.
- No emulation of the mobile OS or any other device-specific things that may impact gameplay (e.g. hardware). Roblox tries to hide these things but they can still be important sometimes.
- To test a game in the mobile app the place file needs to be published, which is unnecessary and annoying.
- It is difficult to find development games on the mobile app. Recently the mobile app stopped displaying private games in the recently played category, and the favorites category on the home screen has been made more difficult to find as well. The easiest strategy for me now going to game’s page in the device’s browser and launching the app from there. See: Make it easier to find development games on mobile
- Useful features of studio are inaccessible from the mobile app:
- Debugging
- Multiplayer local servers
- No persistent/copyable/savable client/server output. (The desktop client has a similar problem, but at least we have Studio).
- Can’t see or modify the DataModel, which is useful for quickly testing one-off things without adding code.
- No command bar.
As a potential solution it would be really nice if I could just directly attach Studio to my mobile device, similar to how Android Studio works.
- Directly launch a place file on my mobile device without needing to publish it.
- Have Studio interact with relevant data such as client/server output, the Explorer and Properties window, etc. in the same way you’d get in a normal testing session.
- Debugging and local servers (mobile could use same strategy as VR: player being controlled by the device is based on which Studio window is active)
