Hey everyone!
In an effort to improve the time between expansions being released and them being added to TCG One, and in an attempt to help reduce the number of bugs in these sets we’ve decided to push hard to get people helping out with testing. On the Discord server we have created the #development channel. Here we will try to keep testing organized so we can know what is working and what is not. I hope that this will be a useful and welcoming channel where we can all work together to make TCG One even better.
Everyone is welcome to come in and help out. More people testing means more bugs get caught early, which means fewer games ruined by a bug suddenly appearing while you’re trying to have fun playing the TCG. Even if you can only test one or two cards every once in a while, every little bit helps.
While everyone is welcome, and the more testers we have overall the better, the best testers will likely be the following:
- Extremely knowledgeable about the Pokémon Trading Card Game – Being able to recall possible weird interactions between cards so that you can test those situations will reduce the number of strange and possibly confusing bugs that will show up when those interactions happen in a live game.
- Not knowing anything about the implementation side – This is the biggest issue with having only the developers testing. We have a bias due to knowing how the code works, that we’ll make assumptions that may not actually be true. Testers that don’t have that burden are more likely to find the simplest bugs we accidentally create.
HOW TO START TESTING
In general, you can go to https://dev.tcgone.net/ and log in with your TCG ONE account. If it fails to load it may be that a redeploy has been triggered after some changes have been merged. Wait a couple minutes and try again. You’ll also be disconnected from the server if a redeploy starts while you are testing. We’ll try to let everyone know when we’re merging, but we cannot guarantee it.
Once logged in, choose a format. (there are no decks to choose from) This choice is not an important one in most cases. It just dictates the ruleset that will be used, so it is recommended to just use one that makes it easier to test with. Sometimes a feature will only be implemented in certain formats, in those cases you’ll want to test in those formats, and even test that they don’t happen in other formats. Once you click “GO” two random decks will be generated for both “players” and the game will begin.
At this point the dev server is much like a single-player version of the sandbox mode on the website. You can choose any card we have implemented in the drop down and add it to your hand/deck/discard, attach any energy you need to via free rainbow energy attachments with a button, and even freely switch the Pokémon. You’ll have control of each player on their respective turn so you can even recreate a game log by playing each players turn out the same way the game log said it did.
When a developer merges their code into the codebase a new build of the dev server will begin deploying, and the developer will copy links to the related Trello cards. It is recommended that you read the card and its comments to get an idea of what needs to be tested. The developer will also add two reactions to their message, one indicating approval, and one indicating disapproval. After testing, you should click on one of the reactions. If everything works as it should for you, you should click the reaction that means everything is good. Otherwise, you should click the disapproval reaction and tell us what issue you ran into in the channel.
The currently active Trello boards are:
If you’ve worked on a card or tested it, please add yourself to the Trello ticket (card).
If a Trello ticket mentions more than one card to test and you don’t end up testing them all, tell us about any that didn’t work, and which ones you tested. As an example Trello is a whole set so there are many cards to test. You might say:
Galarian Cursola V had a problem
[... description of problem ...]. I tested from Weedle to Liepard.
This can help others choose to check cards that haven’t been tested already, or to confirm issues occur. There likely won’t be reactions to click for these as it’ll be difficult for everyone to test every card.
If a card crashes with an exception, paste the crash message into the corresponding Trello Card. Surround the error message in three backticks before and after to help with formatting. Like below:
<error message>
Troubleshooting
The dev server will go down from time to time when a developer pushes code to the server. When this happens, the server will come back up in 5-10 minutes.
If you need any help feel free to ask any questions you have in the Discord #development channel. Those of us who are used to testing on the development server will be happy to help!
Note: this topic is marked as wiki so you are welcome to edit/improve it!
Have fun, and happy testing!