Quickstarts

Quickstarts are short, task-focused refreshers for people who already know The Test Cabinet and just need the steps. They stay deliberately terse: each one gives the commands and the bare minimum of context, and links out to the User Guides and Components sections for the detail it skips.

If you are setting the project up for the first time, start with First Time Setup instead — the quickstarts assume a working toolchain, a container runtime, the run-container image, and a configured API key.

Available quickstarts

Setup

• Set Up Authentication — give a harness the API key or subscription credentials a run needs.
• Register and Log In — create a user account and sign in, so push, review, and publish are attributed to you.

Development

• Run a Test Case — drive a single test case through a harness and write a run record.
• Run the Local Service Stack — bring up the backend, dispatcher, driver, and console on local k3d and enqueue a run.
• Review a Run — submit a review (one per account) for a pushed run.

Authoring — end-to-end

• Author an End-to-End Test Case — scaffold a new playable-game case or version under test-cases/.
• Create an End-to-End Variant — add a new playable mode to an existing end-to-end version.

Authoring — 2D asset generation

• Author an Asset-Generation Test Case — scaffold a new sprite (draw) or sprite-sheet (draw-sheet) case or version.
• Create a Single-Sprite Variant — add a brief variation to a single-sprite version (asset_kind = "sprite").
• Create a Sprite-Sheet Variant — add a brief variation to a sprite-sheet version (asset_kind = "sprite-sheet").
• Author a UI Test Case — paint a high-resolution interface asset (asset_kind = "ui") with the paint/ui binaries.
• Author a Material Test Case — author a tileable PBR material (asset_kind = "material") with texture/pbr.

Authoring — 3D asset generation

• Author a Voxel Model Test Case — sculpt a static cube-voxel model (asset_kind = "voxel-model") with the voxel binary.
• Create a Voxel Model Variant — add a brief variation to a static voxel-model version.
• Author a Voxel Animation Test Case — sculpt a rigged voxel model and author its required animations (asset_kind = "voxel-animation").
• Create a Voxel Animation Variant — add a brief variation to a rigged voxel version.
• Author a Mesh Model Test Case — sculpt a static meshed SDF model (mc/sn/dc — *-model) one operation at a time.
• Create a Mesh Model Variant — add a brief variation to a static meshed version.
• Author a Mesh Animation Test Case — sculpt and rig an animated meshed model (*-animation) with declared required animations.
• Create a Mesh Animation Variant — add a brief variation to a rigged meshed version.
• Author a Skinned Character Test Case — sculpt one continuous deforming skin on a model-invented skeleton (mc/sn/dc-skinned).
• Author a Blender Character Test Case — build a rigged, skinned character in headless Blender via build.py + tcab-blend (asset_kind = "blender-character").

Authoring — effects & audio

• Author a Particle Test Case — author an emitter system (particle-2d/particle-3d) simulated live against a brief.
• Author an Audio Test Case — author a short clip (sfx-synth/sfx-sample/music) through the matching audio binary.
• Publish an Audio Sample Pack — build an sfx-sample/music pack from its manifest, upload it to R2, and pin it so the run image bakes it in.

DevOps

• Add or Update a Model — curate a model in the app (display name, aliases, logo, description).
• Publish a Run — push, review, and publish a run to public hosting and the gallery.
• Publish a Reference — deploy a case variant’s authored reference implementation to Cloudflare Pages and record it.
• Publish Errata — record a known issue with a shipped version (no release, no version bump) so it stays in the version’s metrics.
• Roll Production Service Images — promote the latest CI-built service images to the prod cluster by re-pinning the overlay.
• Cut a Release — ship vX.Y.Z: prepare the release branch, rehearse on staging, publish the artifacts, then land the catalog and services in prod.

Each quickstart has a matching User Guide that covers the same task in full, including prerequisites and the reasoning behind each step.