Can any employee boot up the latest testing branch and play the game whenever they want?
TL;DRCompany policy lets anyone play the latest build, though most staff lack time, so production playtests have recently been held on Fridays and have proven helpful.
If you haven't booted up the game and played what we have so far in a while, it takes a really, really, really long time, if it's been forever, but theoretically anyone can. You just have to make sure you're updating.
As far as company policy goes, anybody is allowed to get in there and try the game. Most of us do not have the time as much as we'd like to.
We've started having, and this has actually been really helpful, production playtests every Friday where we carve out time and actually enforce this, because everyone gets so busy and it's easy to be like, oh, I know. But we're starting to be a little more diligent about it and it's been great, because every time we're like, oh, hey, this little thing right here would be great if we addressed it. So we started those a few weeks ago and they've been really helpful.