Introduction to the GameTest Framework
GameTest Framework is a toolset available to creators to build and test any new content created by you. Within the world of Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, you can express infinite forms of gameplay and variability in your content. With all these creative possibilities, sometimes you may need additional tools to help validate that your experiences are running just as you expect it, and assist you as you customize aspects of the broader Minecraft environment.
What happens if you change the behavior of Villagers? Or introduce a new Mob? Small changes can have unexpectedly big impacts that can be really hard to anticipate. With the GameTest Framework - a system for establishing sets of tests - you can track and repeat to ensure everything works the way you intend.
With these tests, you can express and document your expectations for how things should work - both for your content and games, and for the Minecraft world. You'll be able to save time by using GameTests to take the place of repeatedly needing to manually play through conditions just to validate that all is working as expected.
Submitting and using GameTests can be a great way to establish and communicate the expected behavior you are looking for. As you build more complex worlds and adventures, use the GameTest Framework as a tool to validate facets of your content.
Requirements
To get started, you'll want to begin with understanding how a behavior pack works within Minecraft. To read more about creating behavior packs, see this topic:
What's a GameTest?
A GameTest is a miniature environment along with a set of starting conditions, such as a set of mobs or items. After that environment plays out in the Minecraft world for a period of time, a GameTest has conditional code that evaluates whether expected conditions were met. If a test passes, you will receive confirmation that everything is working as expected. When a test fails, you can observe and diagnose why it may have failed.
Let's examine a potential use case for a GameTest. Let's say that we want to validate that a minecart can make its way around curves and over a complex track when Redstone triggers it. We can build a GameTest for this case by building out a track, placing a minecart at the start of the track, and then power the track with a block of Redstone. We can then validate that the minecart reaches the end of its track within a reasonable time-frame. Minecraft includes a growing set of GameTests that test various basic situations in the Minecraft world. However, you can build your own GameTests to validate any changes you introduce.
Running tests within game
To run tests within a game, you'll want to create a new world or start with a copy of your existing adventure and experience.
Within this GameTest world, you'll want to ensure that cheats are enabled and that the Beta APIs experiment is turned on. If you've created GameTest Framework tests within behavior packs, you'll want to add those behavior packs in your world. You can see an example set of gametests available at https://github.com/microsoft/minecraft-gametests. You'll want to download this pack of gametests, copy them into your developer_behavior_packs folder in Minecraft, and then create a world that uses this behavior pack.
Important
You'll also likely want to specify some additional changes in your environment:
- Selecting a Creative game mode
- Selecting a Flat world
- You will want to retain Normal difficulty (mobs work differently compared to Peaceful worlds)
Once the world is loaded, use the /gametest command to run tests.
To run the default set of tests, use /gametest runset.
What's Next?
Building sets of GameTests requires building out your GameTests via a behavior pack, and writing some simple JavaScript code. When building out your own tests, you will likely want to start a new test behavior pack that is just focused on adding additional GameTests.