The MyMiniStudio private beta is underway

It's really happening: the first wave of testers is now painting in MyMiniStudio. After many months of building the digital miniature painting studio we always wanted for ourselves, it's both thrilling and a little terrifying to hand it to real painters. If you've been following along, here's where things stand, and how to get in.

What the private beta is

MyMiniStudio is a purpose-built digital miniature painting studio that runs in your browser, on iPad, and on Android. The private beta is a hands-on, working test. There is a saying in the software industry that no design survives the user. This is the part of the process where we lean right into that. We're inviting painters in small, focused waves so we can actually talk to every tester rather than broadcast at a crowd and hope we're on the right track.

What we're testing right now

Early waves are all about the fundamentals:

• Does painting feel right? When you lay down a wash, does it settle where you expect? Does the drybrush catch the edges the way your hand intended? Are the default settings good for most use cases, or do you need to open up the advanced brush controls and tweak it yourself?
• Device compatibility across browsers, iPads, and Android tablets, with and without a stylus.
• How intuitive the tools are for someone opening the app for the very first time.

Later waves widen out: stress-testing the flow with thousands of different 3D models, catching edge cases, and figuring out what sensible default settings should be. STL's come in all shapes and sizes and often without consistency. We will want to be prepared out of the box for most of what comes our way.

What we're looking for in a tester

Honestly? All kinds of painters. We want people who are curious about the hobby but have never picked up a brush, folks who push their skills to competition level, and everyone in between. What matters most is that you'll actually paint and tell us what you find. Sharing your painted pieces with us is part of the process. Seeing what you make, and where the tools fought you, is the feedback.

Every tester is invited to a private Discord where we hang out with the community, answer questions, and shape what gets built next.

So get your backlog of unprinted models meant for 3D printing an prepare them for a date with the digital paint brush.

How to join

If that sounds like fun rather than homework, we'd love to have you. Head to the beta signup page, tell us a bit about your setup and your experience, and we'll reach out as we open up the next waves. You can also read more about who we are and why we built this.