Creating and Copying a Game

Games — new ones and copies alike — are created by the domain administrator. An ordinary author can do neither: otherwise a domain would quickly fill up with test and spam games.

1. Sign up on the site of your game domain.
2. Ask the domain's administration — the contacts are usually at the bottom of the domain's pages.
3. Give them your login on the site and say whether you need a team game or a single-player one.
4. The administrator creates the game and lists you as its author. That is a separate step: a freshly created game has no authors at all, and without it the game will not show up for you.

After that your game card on the main page looks different from a player's: next to “Enter the game” there is “Edit”, and below them — “Team contacts” and “One-time teams”. Further down the same card are the applications and the list of accepted teams.

A copy is made with the same form as a new game, and by the same person — the domain administrator. There is no “Copy the game” button in the author's panel.

In the admin bar: “Games” → “New game”. In the dialog:

• Game type — team or single-player;
• ID of the game to copy — leaving it empty means “create an empty one”.

What gets copied: the settings, the levels, the codes, the bonuses, the hints, the spanning bonuses, the task orders and the translation dictionaries. Teams, applications and statistics do not: the copy is clean.

The engine then opens the copy in the editor straight away.

• A copy is not hidden. An empty game is named #New Unnamed Game, and the leading # hides it from players. A copy, though, is named “Name (Copy)“, without the #, and it inherits the original's start time. Copy a running or an announced game and a second one, visible to everybody, appears on the domain at once. Rename the copy with a leading # right away.
• The game type is taken from the dialog, not from the original. “Team” is pre-selected there, so a copy of a single-player game comes out as a team game unless you switch it.
• Pictures are not copied. The files stay in the original game's folder, and the copy's tasks go on pointing there — see Game Files.

Two routes.

By id, as a copy. If you are an author of the source game and the target domain has an administrator, they open “New game” on their own domain and type your game's id. The copy lands on the domain it was created from.

Through JSON. Export the scenario (Exporting to JSON), ask the target domain's administrator for an empty game, and import the json into it (Importing from JSON). This route is the one to use when the target domain's administrator has no access to the source game.

In both cases the pictures have to be uploaded into the new game again.

• Section for Administrators — the admin bar and what is in it.
• Game Files — what happens to pictures when a game is copied.