Have you considered learning about GIT and believe that now is the moment to get started? GIT is a piece of software that tracks changes in any set of files. It is commonly used to coordinate work among programmers who are collaboratively generating source code during software development. Its objectives include data integrity, speed, and support for distributed, non-linear operations (thousands of parallel branches running on different systems).
“I’m sure Git is fantastic, but it appears complicated – I’ll stick with my current workflow,” is equal to “I’m sure IDEs like FlashDevelop and Sublime Text are excellent, but they seem complicated – I’ll stick with Notepad.” There is a learning curve, and while you can survive without it, learning anything new will not hurt you, and you will unlock a skill set to speed up your task. In this post, I’ll explain why GIT is excellent and how it plays a part in game development.
Here is what GIT can do for you!
GIT lets you undo any changes
The main point of Git, arguably, is that it can take a “snapshot” of your whole game’s working directory whenever you want, and you may revert to any of those snapshots at any moment. It’s a far better technique than creating a duplicate of your whole folder whenever you obtain a functioning version of the game or send the code to yourself with a description to make sure you don’t lose it.
Further, you are not limited to a single line of undos and redos; you may divide your project into various branches of snapshots and switch between them at any time. It means you could add new features to version 1.1, then go back to v1.0 and apply a bug fix or work on an experimental feature and discard it if it doesn’t work out, or keep your mobile and tablet versions distinct.
Git allows you to comment on your work as well as your code.
Actually, Git does not just allow you to make comments, but it encourages and even compels you to do so. Essentially, anytime you save a snapshot, you include a remark indicating the changes you made since the last snapshot.
Besides making it easier to find a specific point in a project’s history (which is often useful for tracking down the cause of a bug), it also helps to build good development habits, instead of working on eight different things at once, you’ll find yourself breaking work down into smaller tasks so that each part can be fully described in a short comment.
Git Provides Better Access to Other Projects
So far, I’ve been describing Git, which is simply a software tool like zip, email, or FTP. GitHub, on the other hand, is a website where you may save your Git snapshots (and therefore your entire project).
Many games and game dev tools, such as Tiled and the Starling Framework, are openly available on GitHub. It is implied that instead of downloading the latest version of Starling Framework as a zip file and extracting it to your project, you may import the entire folder and keep it automatically updated anytime there is a change.
Git Makes Collaboration with Other Developers Easier
For all of the reasons stated above, Git is extremely beneficial for solo devs. However, many of these advantages are intrinsically useful when working in a team:
- Committing to a collaborative project through Git ( via GitHub’s premium private plans or another hosting mechanism) is far more convenient than sharing everything via email attachments or Dropbox.
- Because each snapshot uploaded to the project is labeled with a note and author, it’s simple to keep track of who accomplished what.
- Each team member can work on their code and only commit it to the main project when it is complete (thus avoiding breaking anything).
Git also provides tools for “merging” various pieces of code together, forcing you to deal with any conflicts rather than just overwriting sections of the project.
A git project can start with 2 possibilities, which is create and clone.
- Create, you are the first one to start the project. This usually happens on the git providers not locally. You could use sourcetree to create a testing environment for git having remote and local on the same machine.
- Clone, you are connecting to another project. You make a copy of all the history. You can even clone a local repository for testing.
One of the most common mistakes people make when utilizing Git for game development is failing to maintain or retain versions. Those who make this error do not save the earlier code; instead, they create new modifications and delete the old ones, totally neglecting the requirement to keep the code in case they need to roll back.
Another mistake is believing that hardware is the most dependable thing. Those who make this error keep code on USBs, external hard drives, and other storage devices. They completely disregard the usage of the software.
