A couple of the very first blogs on this site were dedicated to source control management for this project, so I guess a nice way to bookend development on Gunmetal Arcadia Zero would be to return to that topic.

My general-purpose game engine/framework exists in a Subversion repository of its own, which is included as an external of the derived game’s repository. Starting with Super Win the Game, I’ve been making branches of the engine for shipping. This serves two purposes: it preserves the state of the engine as it was when I launched a particular game such that future engine work won’t unexpectedly break that game, and it allows me to make one-off changes to the engine for that game specifically when needed.

Last week, I branched my engine for shipping Gunmetal Arcadia Zero. I’ve already made a handful of checkins to that branch to address issues like the exploit mentioned in Episode 34. Some of these changes may get merged back into the main branch (or “trunk” in the SVN vernacular), but I can feel safe in the knowledge that, should I need to make awful hardcoded hacks to the engine to fix Zero bugs after launch, I can do so without upsetting other projects.

I don’t recall whether I mentioned it at the time, but last August, when I spun Zero off into its own separate game, I branched the Gunmetal Arcadia Subversion repository for that game. Since then, all Zero development has occurred in its own game branch, while also touching main engine source.

Now that Zero is effectively complete and I’m returning to the roguelike Gunmetal Arcadia, I’m faced with how to handle merging these changes back in. Truth be told, there’s very little work that’s gone into Zero that I think I absolutely can’t reuse for the roguelike, so for starters, I’ve taken everything. Where conflicts arose (mostly in binary content of test maps), I’ve taken changes from the Zero branch. In essence, I’m picking up development on the roguelike Gunmetal Arcadia not where I left it off last August, but at the very end of Zero development today.

I’ve been focused on development the last few months, so I haven’t had a whole lot of time to think about event presence this year, but as of yesterday, I’ve signed up for a booth at the local Let’s Play Gaming Expo June 18-19. I missed this one last year, as I already had obligations around the same time, but it’s now in its second year, and it sounds like it’s gonna be a lot of fun! I’ll be showing Gunmetal Arcadia Zero, of course, and I may try to expand the merch selection this year with t-shirts or soundtrack CDs. We’ll see how it goes!

After Wednesday’s video, I’m taking the next week off from development and blogging. I’ll return the week of May 9.