Forgive me if I just missed how to do this, but is there a way to read your own game/story before publishing? As the author, I can see all of my chapters, regardless of conditions, and all of my variables, regardless of score. Am I missing something? I'd like to be able to go through my story before I submit it to make sure all of the variables and conditions and loops are correct.
Indeed you can and all you have to do is to not publish your entire story, nor its chapters, to the public, and simply "play the game." To demonstrate, I'll be using my own story game: Firstly, here are the conditions present. All 0's. Granted this is a public story now, but I'll be writing chapters that I won't intend to publish for the sake of extermination. Moving on, here's the chapter in question: I've managed to add a different condition and the site says that I still have to publish the chapter for it to be public. If I somehow managed to miss your point and you don't intend to actually want to play your story, then simply don't press the play button.
As stated above, you can play/test your story as soon as it is saved as draft. There is one important difference if you are the story owner (or a user with a user role in that story): If you click on a chapter link, you actually see that chapter. The chapter contains a link that leads you to the linked chapter. This chapter won't be visible for regular readers. It is only for the writers to be able to easily access the edit chapter page of chapter links. When you create a variable or change its value, you have the possibility to change the visibility of the variable as well. If a variable is set to invisible, it won't show up in the Score tab of a regular reader. If you are the story owner or an editor of the story, there is an additional button "Hidden Variables" (or sth like that) that allows you to additionally show all variables that are hidden for regular readers. If you want to test later chapters of your story, I recommend adding chapter links to the introduction chapter. In these chapter links, you can define certain sets of variables and jump to later chapters. That way, you don't have to go down certain paths over and over again.
