# Introduction

Gamestage, made by Monterosa, takes a game you have vibe coded in a browser and
puts it into production. The answers, the scoring, the play limits and the
settlement move to a server. The interface stays as you built it.

A prototype keeps its answers in the page, where anyone who opens the developer
tools can read them. That is fine for a demo and stops being fine the moment
strangers play for something. Moving the answers off the page also brings the
things a live game needs and a prototype has none of: logs, monitoring, and
limits on how often one person can play.

## How does Gamestage change your game?

Your web app keeps its interface and sends each play to Gamestage. The Engine
holds the material a player must not see, works out the result and sends back
what it decided.

```
BROWSER BEFORE                        BROWSER AFTER
──────────────────────────────        ──────────────────────────────
interface and input                   interface and input
answers and values                       ↓  intent
scoring and limits                    ┌────────────────────────────┐
                                      │ ENGINE                     │
                                      │ answers, scoring, locks,   │
                                      │ attempts, settlement       │
                                      └────────────────────────────┘
                                         ↓  committed outcome
                                      the page renders what it is told
```

The decisions move to the server and you keep the interface.

## Who Gamestage is for

Gamestage is made for creators or developers with a game prototype that runs in
a browser and a coding agent like Claude Code or Codex doing the work. You
install our CLI tool, then the agent reads its existing source, moves private
material into the App Manifest, wires a newly generated client and runs a
series of checks.

You make the decisions an agent should not: rights, audience, identity, and
anything that changes what a live audience can touch.

You do not need to have used Monterosa before. Inspecting your game and
scaffolding its manifest need no account; running it against the Engine does,
once you reach that step.

## What Gamestage is not

**It is not a front-end game engine.** Gamestage does not draw anything, own a
scene graph or ask you to adopt a framework. The Engine holds one game format's
rules and answers questions about a play. Your app is still your app.

**It is not a cloud hosting company.** Every deployed game, on Starter and
above, is a project on [Monterosa](https://www.monterosa.co/)
[Interaction Cloud](https://products.monterosa.co/mic/core-concepts) with real
editions, and Starter games are served from a Playground environment so a game
has somewhere to live. A paid plan changes which Space your projects sit in
and adds Studio's content management and live-operations tooling; it does not
change whether the platform is involved at all. Hosting comes with the
Monterosa platform.

**It does not log players in.** Gamestage ships no identity provider and expects
you to bring one. It accepts OIDC through JWT tokens: a game that wants named
players points at its own issuer and keys, and Gamestage checks the tokens your
existing login already hands out.

## Where the product is today

Gamestage is in Preview and being tested with Monterosa customers. The two
halves of the product are at different stages.

The local route is active: inspecting a game, choosing its format and
scaffolding the manifest need no account. Running the real Engine rules on
your machine and proving the result in a browser do, once you get that far,
because from there you are running against your account rather than reading
your own files.

The hosted route is in Preview. The CLI points at `https://api.gamestage.ai`,
and Backstage needs an approved account rather than open signup.

Where this documentation is unsure, it says so rather than rounding up.