Publishing, and what review means

The states a map moves through

There are three, and knowing them saves a lot of confusion about why a map is not in the lobby yet.

1. Pending. You filled in the publish dialog and submitted. The map is queued for review. It is not playable by the public and not listed anywhere.
2. Approved. A moderator passed it. It can be played and it appears in the lobby for other people to find.
3. Rejected. A moderator turned it down and left feedback explaining what needs to change. You can read that feedback, fix the map, and resubmit — which puts it back to pending.

Nothing about that loop is a punishment; a rejection with feedback is a to-do list. But it does mean the gap between “I pressed Publish” and “my friend can play it” is not instant, and you should not schedule anything around the assumption that it is.

What to have ready before you submit

A review is someone opening your map and looking at it. Make that easy.

• A spawn point that works. A reviewer landing inside geometry or falling out of the world learns nothing good about your map.
• A boundary. Somewhere to stop players walking off the edge into nothing.
• A title and description that say what it is. “Test 3” tells a reviewer nothing. The description is also the first thing a player reads in the lobby.
• A genre. Pick the one a player would use to search for your game, not the one that flatters it. It is how your map is filtered in the browser, so a wrong choice buries it among games it does not belong with.
• A thumbnail. It is the entire first impression in a grid of other people’s games.
• One full run-through of your own. Play it start to finish as a player, not as its author. Most rejections are things the author had stopped noticing.

If it is not ready for that, keep working on it. A submission that comes back rejected costs you a round trip through the queue, and the fixes are usually the ones you already knew about.

Map ID: the identity of a published map

Every published map has a Map ID. That, rather than the title, is what the platform means by “this map”.

That matters in three practical ways.

Updates keep it. When you publish again over an existing map, it recognises the update from the Map ID and replaces that map rather than creating a second one. Renaming a map does not orphan it; publishing a differently-named map against the same ID still updates the same entry.

Two maps cannot share one. Identity is enforced on the server, so you cannot end up with two published maps quietly claiming to be the same thing.

It is what you quote. When you report a problem, ask about a moderation decision, or need support for one specific map, the Map ID is the unambiguous reference. Titles are not unique; IDs are.

Updating a live map

Publishing again over a map you already published updates that map rather than creating a second one. It is recognised from the Map ID, so the update lands on the entry players already know.

One habit worth forming early: test the update as an update. A change that works in a fresh scene can behave differently for a player who already carries saved progress from the version before it.

Saves, and whose they are

When you publish you also decide where your game’s player data lives. The default is the honest one: this game keeps its own saves, sealed off from everything else you have made. A player’s progress in one of your games has nothing to do with their progress in another.

The alternative is to share one save bucket across several of your games. That suits a series, or a hub that should carry a shared wallet or unlock. It is opt-in because the default is almost always what you want, and because merging saves after the fact is much harder than splitting them.

What publishing is not

Publishing is for hosted multiplayer on Galatrix. If what you want is an offline, single-player game that lives on your own site, that is a different button: you export a standalone build and host the files yourself, with no review step and no platform involved. Neither route is the “real” one. They answer different questions.

Where to go next

Once a map is live, the work changes shape: you are reading numbers instead of writing features. After you publish covers how discovery works and what the analytics can and cannot tell you.