The Backend Workflow

 I'm still geeking out about all this.

So, like my profile mentions, I'm a DevOps engineer, but even after 2 years I barely know anything about CI/CD stuff, understanding it was never necessary for what I do day to day so I never really looked into it more. But since I've started game dev as a hobby, I've been learning so much that benefits my actual job, first it was a much better foundational understanding of coding. And now, it's the glory of CI/CD pipelines.

So surface level, CI is continuous integration, which basically involves testing your junk to make sure there's no errors. CD is continuous deployment, which is like the equivalent of putting your work out where it can be seen and used. It basically streamlines everything in between saving code changes to publishing the content. I realize that's still a bunch of technobabble so I'll put that in a tangible example.

Say I've got this game on my itch.io page. It's published and people can visit and download the game and whatnot, but I'm still working away at it. In my versioning control, I have the main code branch that they're playing on, and then I've also split off a feature branch where I'm developing in to work on the new stuff. When I get to the point where I'm done working on that branch, I merge it into the main branch. Then what I would normally do is go and export builds of my game, zip them up, and then either manually upload those to my itch.io page, or use butler to make that go a little faster. But, with a CI/CD pipeline, once I merge my feature branch into the main one, that other stuff happens automagically. A virtual container grabs my codes, follows some steps in some YAML file to export playable builds, and then upload them straight to the Itch page.

That is a level of automation I never dreamed of. Maybe not immediately super useful in gamedev, but it does help me understand my role at my income job a bit better.

Oh also I found a way I can update the character model based on armor equipped now