I along with many developers I’ve spoken with have faced the issue of working hard on big updates. The issue is that we can only test by using the testing feature, creating a bunch of alternate players which gets chaotic, switching between each player game tab to test certain features etc. This is useful in some cases, but in most just ends up being chaotic.
My Request
It would be really cool if we could give access to play the saved version of the game (not published) only to certain ranks, friends, etc. Something similar to the play test feature, except they don’t get access to edit the game itself. This way, we can get a select group of people to test updates that are being worked on without having to publish or make special servers.
Wouldn’t that cause more issues than just having 2 versions of the game? I’m thinking of cases where it’s late at night and you accidentally click Publish to Roblox instead of Save to Roblox (been there, done that).
Have your released game, open to the public.
Have your test game, only open to specific players. Do all your updating and testing there, and when it’s finally ready, save that version to your released version.
You’re still able to revert. Personally, I don’t think that is a profound example.
That sounds like it would be incredibly unnecessary and complicated. I’d hate having 2 separate games, one for testing and the other for actually playing on every game I make.
Usually you have two versions of your game, production and development.
Development is where you make updates, test everything make sure its all working.
Production is the main game that is public and is the “stable” version.
That could be avoided by having some checks in the code - If the game ID matches the testing place ID (or some other check to make sure it’s not the full release) then just pretend the item was purchased/owned.
Kinda like how the Roblox sitetest sites gave you prefilled fake/template info for the purchase Robux and Builders club pages so users could have no monetary limits when testing the site.
Or you could have a dev menu of sorts to do the same thing, and just delete it/disable it in the regular release.
Improving the development process shouldn’t be considered a waste of resources… Whether you disagree or not. What an absurd statement. But I digress, everyone is entitled to their own opinions.
My testers have an option in the games main menu which says “Join Test Server” and allows them to join a test server. Its just another place within the experience. The data is separate too. I simply have an if statement for game.placeId == testplaceid in the parts of code that’d be different in the test version (such as data loading).
I would rather see better built-in support for branching, rather than anything like what was described with accessing unpublished versions. Perhaps, it could be a larger part of the Ban API, what about the opposite of it? Would love to easily grant access to branches, that works exactly as you would expect, through Lua and Open Cloud APIs.
You can make your solution, in various ways, whether that’s through creating sub-places, different games, or beyond. However, it’s pretty disappointing that you have to go through a large amount of hoops to enable this pretty basic functionality, and almost always will have some type of disadvantage depending on which way you set it up.