Git Gud

Git repos are a cornerstone to game development. Whether you are working as part of a ‘AAA’ studio making the next great game or as an Indie developer making your newest attempt to reproduce ‘Flappy Birds’.

As a personal habit, I start a git repository for all but my most whimsical experiments for one very simple reason. Because you never start out as just good. Even without using the branch system built into the system and used by the ‘AAA’ studios to keep everything running at the same time, you have a valuable asset in a git repo if you push to it after every sit down. Customized ‘Respawn’ points…

Since most of use that get into Game Development are already into Gaming on some level, I shouldn’t have to explain how valuable something like that can be. ‘Nightly’ Git pushes are the proverbial ‘quick save’ for a Game Developer. Knowing that, at anytime you can roll back to yesterday’s push (Or even further), is a boon to those that experiment while coding. It is tight rope walking inches from the floor instead of dozens of feet, sure it will hurt if the rope breaks, but it is a lot easier to recover from that fall.

So, if you are working on something that losing multiple days work or the full project to a rabbit warren of errors and brute forced code would be devastating or morale breaking, remember to make a Git Repository for it. There is nothing saying that you can’t delete said repo after you are done and have moved on or have decided that it was a failed side quest. Just knowing that you could take the time to experiment safely should be enough to convince you.