Project Grogu

A two-sided playtesting platform that helps indie developers learn from real players before a game ships.

Project Grogu connects developers who need actionable feedback with testers who want to discover unreleased games, participate in structured playtests, and build a record of useful testing work. This repository contains the Next.js frontend. The companion Grogu_backend directory contains the .NET API and PostgreSQL database migrations.

Overview

Game teams often have access to friends or internal testers, but not to a repeatable pool of players with the right platforms, genres, experience, and availability. Feedback can arrive late, be difficult to compare, or lack the context needed to turn it into a development decision.

Grogu organizes that loop in one product:

• Developers publish a game and a playtest brief with goals, requirements, tasks, and a reward.
• Testers discover recruiting playtests, apply with a message, and track their applications.
• Developers review applicants, accept a roster, and receive structured feedback and analytics.
• Testers complete a gated workspace flow: download the build, complete tasks, and submit feedback.

Who It Is For

User	Need	Workflow
Indie developers and small studios	Recruit relevant players and turn play sessions into comparable feedback	Create a game, publish a playtest, manage applicants, review feedback, inspect analytics
Dedicated playtesters	Find interesting games and make testing effort visible	Discover playtests, apply, complete accepted tests, submit reports, maintain a profile

How It Works

flowchart LR
    A[Tester discovers recruiting playtest] --> B[Tester submits application]
    B --> C[Developer reviews applicants]
    C -->|Accept| D[Tester receives accepted test]
    D --> E[Download build and complete tasks]
    E --> F[Submit structured feedback]
    F --> G[Developer reviews feedback and analytics]
    G --> H[Improve the next game build]

Tester journey

1. Browse public playtests from the landing page or Discover.
2. Open a playtest detail page and apply as a tester.
3. Track pending, accepted, rejected, or withdrawn applications.
4. Open an accepted test workspace, record build download progress, and complete required tasks.
5. Submit ratings, sentiment, written observations, bugs, task answers, hours played, and recommendation.
6. Review testing history, reputation, badges, preferences, and profile information.

Developer journey

1. Create a developer account and maintain a studio profile.
2. Create and edit games with genre, platform, status, build version, and cover treatment.
3. Create a playtest covering the game, goals, focus areas, requirements, tasks, reward, capacity, and closing date.
4. Save a draft or publish it for recruitment.
5. Review applicants, accept or reject them, and monitor the accepted roster.
6. Inspect feedback, playtest analytics, and cross-playtest trends.

Implemented Features

Public product experience

• Landing page with featured playtests, featured games, platform information, and separate developer/tester value propositions.
• Public How it works, For developers, and For gamers pages.
• Discover search, sorting, genre, platform, time, and NDA filters.
• Public playtest detail pages with goals, focus areas, requirements, tasks, reward, capacity, and developer information.

Authentication and authorization

• Email/password login and role-select signup for testers and developers.
• Seeded demo-account actions appear on the login screen after the matching backend migration is applied; credentials are intentionally not documented here.
• The API returns a signed bearer token. The browser stores the token locally and sends it on authenticated requests.
• Route guards keep tester and developer areas separate.
• The backend validates ownership and permissions instead of relying only on client-side checks.

Tester workspace

• Dashboard with reputation, level and progress to the next level, plus counts, continue-testing and recent applications.
• Applications with withdrawal, accepted tests, and testing progress.
• Workspace progression from build download to task checklist to feedback submission.
• Build link, install notes and access key, shown only once the tester is accepted.
• Structured feedback with five ratings, sentiment, summary, highlights, pain points, bugs, task answers, recommendation, hours played, and up to six screenshots or recordings.
• Rewards page: the UPI balance (a ledger, with no payout yet), level and level ladder, the ways to earn reputation, each review's studio decision, and the reputation history.
• Profile with a profile picture upload, a UPI id (visible only to the tester), and editable preferences, experience, platforms, genres, languages and availability.
• Notifications for application decisions, review decisions, game keys, level-ups and studio invites.
• Recommended for you on the dashboard: open playtests the tester qualifies for, best match first, each with why it fits. Playtests a studio invited them to rank higher.

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