Game Box Creation - Testing
Once you have a finished JSON control file and the associated image files for a game box, the next step is to test it.
But first you should pass the finished JSON file through a JSON validater like JSON lint.
| Game Box Creation edit | |
"Do It Yourself" Testing
Here are the steps necessary to test the game box on your own PC before publishing it in any form. The setup for this procedure is not easy to do and requires a PC that can run an Apache server. If you can not or are not willing to do this, then skip to the Other Ways To Get It Tested section below.
The Testing Environment
To test a board18 game box you must have a working BOARD18 server. Your local PC could be used for this. This is especially true if you are running a Linux distribution on the PC.
Installing Apache, MySql and PHP on your PC is a bit time consuming, but it can be done by following the detailed instructions available for various operating systems.
For Ubuntu LINUX see
ApacheMySQLPHP.
For Windows see
Apache for Windows or
WampServer.
There is much more documentation out there and it covers other operating systems too.
Creating The BOARD18 Test Site
Next you must create a BOARD18 site on your Apache server.
This help file was intended for people seting up remote servers, but it has all the information that you need to create a local test server.
At this point you should have a working instance of a BOARD18 web site. Test to make sure that it works before you try to use it to test your new game box. The easiest way to do this is to create a few dummy users and start a game using one of the existing game boxes. Make sure that you can drop tokens and tiles and that everything looks as it should. If it works then you can finally start testing your new game box.