Development

What is this?

Board Game Arena Studio is a platform to build online board game adaptation using the Board Game Arena platform.

It is open to any gamer with development skills :)

See announcement here: http://forum.boardgamearena.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1973

How can I develop a board game on BGA Studio?

Check these presentations first:

• 5 reasons why you should use BGA Studio for your online board game
• The 8 steps to create a board game on Board Game Arena
• The BGA Framework at a glance
• Focus on BGA game state machine
• BGA developers guidelines

How do I register?

Registering is done by e-mail at studio(at)boardgamearena.com.

Please provide the following information:

• your developer user name to be used on “BGA Studio” (for technical reasons, no space, number or special character);
• your real name;
• your e-mail address;
• your postal address.

We also drafted a quick 'terms & conditions' document. It's very light, so as to get to the fun part faster.

To be valid, the registration e-mail must contain this document as an attachment, with the following sentence in the mail body: 'I agree with the terms & conditions for developers on BGA Studio joined as an attachment'.

And of course, we also encourage you to tell us about which games you would love to develop on BGA!

Ok, I registered, what do I get?

First, from time to time you will get by e-mail the names of some of the games we have an agreement to develop, so that you can tell us 'Hey, this game is great! I want to develop it!' (please keep these names confidential, or it would ruin our tradition to make players guess the name of the next game on the forum)

NB: during the BETA pĥase, to smooth things up and make sure that everything is working correctly, 
we will work only with 3 fearless developers on 3 simple games.

Second, once we have discussed together and are fixed on a game you'll take charge of, we'll create your studio account and you will get:

• one login / password to access files through SFTP
• ten logins with numeric suffixes from 0 to 9 and a common simple password to test games on the studio website while developing.

Once logged in to your SFTP root folder, you will find:

• a 'resources.html' file with the URLs to use and some extra connection information
• three folders containing the three simple games provided as examples
• a folder for the game you will be developing initialized after our 'EmptyGame' template, providing the game structure (and comments! and examples!)

Then... that's all, you can start!

Great, I'm in! ... How should I start?

If you didn't already, check the presentations at the top of this page to get the basics.

After that, we would advise you to take a peek at this tutorial for creating the Reversi example game:

• Tutorial reversi

Then start editing files and see what happens! ;)

If you have any questions, please ask them on the development forum!

Other resources

Studio FAQ

Studio file reference

Studio function reference

Studio back-office

Development forum

Bugs forum