Hi I’m AceOfSpider of Buy Me A Drink First games and this week I’ll be sharing how I am able to push a new staging build of my game automatically every Wednesday to Itch.io.

Here’s the situation: I want to spend as much time as possible developing my game and I want to get regular releases out the door for testing. The answer is a build pipeline. All the week I make my changes to my game and commit them to GitHub. Every Wednesday at 5:20pm something called Jenkins awakens from the shadows.

Jenkins is a build pipeline tool, it pulls the latest version of the game from GitHub, then it slaps a new build number into the code (that’s the number shown in the bottom left in game and help keeps track of what changes relate to the version you are playing).

Jenkins building a new version for staging

I make games in GameMaker, it’s just something I find I can iterate quickly in. Gamemaker has a command line tool called Igor which can be used to build the game for different platforms. So the next step is for Jenkins to run this build process for Web, Windows and Linux. If there are any issues building any platform the process stops and I get notified. This is one of the benefits of this process, you are aware sooner if there is a problem rather than on release day and you’d have to scramble to fix it.

Igor pushing the Web build 61 to the RoK Staging page of itch.io

I host games on Itch.io There is also a command line tool for this called Butler. Butler is great because it only needs to send new and changed files, very efficient. Butler will upload the new versions to Itch.io and label them with the current build number. Straight from that the newer versions are ready to play.

From the automatic trigger the whole process from start to finish takes 45 seconds and I don’t have to lift a finger. Apart from telling people about it, but that is for a future dev log about automation of social media posting and changelog generation, so stay tuned if that sounds interesting.

Thanks for listening, see you in the next one.

~AceOfSpider