Find the fun
Put your web game in front of players with one link, then watch where they light up, where they get stuck, and where they quit.
Agents: start at llms.txt. Questions? Ask in the Discord.
- AFAmber FoxPlaying21
- QHQuiet Heron2 min ago10
- BLBrave Lynx4 min ago42
How it works
1Set up your game page
A title, a description, a cover image and a web build. Players get a play page that opens with a welcome card, and if you like, an About page with screenshots that search engines can find. Do it yourself in the studio, or have your agent do it.
Put this game on Betacade.
Start at https://api.betacade.com/llms.txt
MAKE NO MISTAKES.Hop between floating platforms under a very large moon. A cozy platformer about toads, gravity and snacks.
How to play. Tap to hop, hold to hop higher, and eat every snack before the sun comes up.
2Share one link
Players open it in the browser, on a phone or a laptop. No install, no account.
3See what your players did
Live players, progress from their saves, errors with what led up to them, their notes, and a replay of each session you can scrub through.
4Quash bugs
Feedback lands on one board beside your issues, each with the moment it happened. Turn a note into an issue and move it along, from Issues to In progress to Ready to test, then Fixed or Won't fix. Players who reported it are told which build fixed it.
5Find the fun
Reply to players by their nickname, tell them when it's fixed, and hear what they make of the new build. You never see their email; they never see yours.
- AFAmber Fox
- BLBrave Lynx
- QHQuiet Heron
Meet your players where they are
Run your playtests and the community around your game together, without moving anyone off Discord.
Sign in with Discord.
Players and studios can sign in with Discord, or link it to the account they already have.
Your Discord, on your game.
Add your server's invite and players see "Join the Pond Studio Discord" on the welcome and in the pause menu. Give the Discord its own tracked link to see how many players came from it.
Notes from Discord.
If your game's channel is on the Betacade Discord, right-click a message there, pick Apps, then Send to Betacade, and it lands in your game's inbox. Roles there show who plays (Playtester) and who makes games (Studio).
Work as a team
Invite people by email. Viewers are free on any plan; developers need Pro.
Viewers and developers.
Viewers see dashboards, playtests, replays and feedback. Developers also deploy, change settings and reply to testers. Up to 3 people on Free, 10 on Pro.
Who did what.
The dashboard says who shipped each build, and a tester's thread who wrote each reply. Players never see who's in the studio, only its name.
Private builds.
Give a build to one group of people while everyone else keeps playing the public one. Replays and Rewind work on it too. On Pro.
Show it off
For when your game is ready for a crowd.
Leaderboards and achievements.
A leaderboard of the scores your game sends, with names only for players who opt in. Achievements are rules over the saves that Betacade checks, so players can't award themselves.
Live pages.
Put a page on a big screen at an event: a QR code to play, a running scoreboard, and replays of the best runs.
Jams.
Make a jam page and share its code. Games join, players play and vote for their top 3, and the results show when voting closes.
Built for your agent
Claude Code, Cursor or Codex can do the whole loop.
One prompt.
Give your agent the prompt above. It signs in once with a code you approve, uploads the build and hands back the link. Files that haven't changed aren't uploaded again.
One guide.
llms.txt covers deploying, setting up the page, reading who played and what they said, and filing bugs. Every answer from the API tells the agent what to do next.
A versioned API.
Every route is versioned and in the OpenAPI spec. The changelog marks anything that breaks and says how to migrate.
For players
Playing is free, in the browser, with no account.
Your saves follow you.
Sign in with your email or Discord and your saves come with you to any device. Pick up where you left off, switch between saves, or go back to an earlier one.
Anonymous to studios.
Studios see your progress under a made-up name, like Amber Fox, never your name or email. You choose whether a game sends anything at all, and you can turn it off any time.
Your data, your call.
See what a studio sees about you, and delete your play data for any game whenever you like.
Questions
Which engines work?
Unity (WebGL export), Godot 4 (web export) and plain HTML and JavaScript, so anything that exports to the web. Unreal and native mobile games can be playtested a slice at a time.
Do players need an account?
No. They play from a link in the browser. Signing in, with email or Discord, keeps their saves and name across devices.
Can I keep a build private?
Yes, on Pro. A build can be for chosen people only, while your game's link keeps playing the latest public build.
What do you record?
Only what a player agrees to share. Play time, how far they got from the game's own saves, errors, feedback and, where on, replays. Studios see a nickname, never the player's email, and players can see and delete their data.
What happens after December 31?
Studios on Founding Pro keep $15 a month for as long as they stay subscribed. New Pro subscriptions are $29 a month.
How is this different from itch.io or Steam Playtest?
itch.io hosts and sells games. Betacade shows you how people played yours, and works on itch.io too, through betacade.js. Steam Playtest is for desktop games on Steam. Betacade is for web builds anyone can play from a link.