Ravosa Report - GitHub Branches: Why We Use Them & Why We Nuke Them

You know it, you love it, you love to hate it! That's right, it's GitHub. This past week the engineering department had the privilege of setting up the GitHub repository for our game. If you want specifics on that, our Technical Director Marin posted a great devlog about setting up a GitHub repository for a Unity project. In this Ravosa Report I'll be talking briefly about Git branches.

Merge conflicts are an absolute nightmare and they occur when multiple engineers make changes to the same part of our project. To prevent this, the engineering department divided up the main repository of our project into individual branches which only hold a single engineer's changes. These branches allow our team to peer review code before merging it into the main branch of the project. So, that's why we love branches in this house, and that's why we'll be using them for this project. Those branches were set up over this last week.

The biggest obstacle for me this last week was dealing with an issue where Unity was not linking to my Visual Studio download. In trying to fix the issue, I completely blew up my installation of Unity. Consequently, my branch was in terrible shape. The good news was that none of my changes were merged with the main branch while my branch was banged up. Using branches saved us the heartache of having to rollback the repository. This was the perfect situation for me to nuke, or delete, my branch. Everything on my branch got deleted, but it had no impact on the project as a whole.

Deleting my branch allowed me to safely reinstall Unity and allow it to link to Visual Studio. I created a new branch and from there I had no obstacles for the rest of the week.