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What are best practices for keeping old versions available as a project develops?

A topic by eric81766 created Jan 13, 2019 Views: 483 Replies: 1
Viewing posts 1 to 2

I'm working on a game and I'd like to make all of the early development versions available so that I can discuss the changes I've made to the game in terms of programming and gameplay. Right now I'm making web-playable versions of the game since it is still in a rather simple state.

I'd like to keep all the versions available online for play so that I can point out how each simple demo has led towards finding "the 10 seconds of fun" that I want to then keep developing until it is finally a complete game.

Right now, I started with making each version a separate project, but this is looking to then give my account a whole lot of projects which are all really just snippets of work in progress.

Has anyone else done something like this and found a good way to organize it? 

Examples of the type of content I have -- each is a new version of the game as it develops

  1. basic test of physics and interactions -- what is interesting here? what might be the "fun" part?
  2. adding in a second player - can start to see how those interesting interactions from #1 can be developed even more when interacting with another player
  3. adding in a simple "world" with more things to interact with and allowing the players to compete in a race - now the "10 seconds of fun" part can be identified and played with. How can this be extended into a full game? Is it more fun to play this as a race? As a puzzle? Is it more fun for the players to cooperate or compete?
  4. expand the race mode to a complete playable "level" of a race.  Is this a fun race worth developing out to a full racing game with multiple levels? Or should I try to make a playable puzzle level and see if there is potential for a full game of that?

And so on, showing all my steps as a development journey with each step playable so that the reader can see how I made my decisions. 

Ideally I think it should all be as one project with the different progressing versions in the devlog, but it looks to me like there can only be one HTML version of the game in the files which eliminates the ability to demo the progression.

I started out making separate projects for each step - but that's going to fill my account with projects that are really just pieces of a project.

I could host all the example steps on my own website - but that kinda cuts out all the benefits of using itch.io.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I could better implement this or if there is some feature I'm not aware of to allow me to show different versions of the same project from within the project?

I am making up my own answer in case anyone comes across this a-wonderin':

I found this reference:

You can create multiple accounts and give permission to one account to edit the details of the products of the other. All products will show up on your dashboard to edit and configure but to customers they will appear as being sold by different companies/people and will have their own subdomain.

...

So, if I understand correctly, I don't even have to login to other accounts if I'm the admin to those accounts from the "main" account. And even if I lose access to "sub" accounts, I should be able to change the password and everything, because, if I remember correctly, it says that an admin you add has all the privileges like the original account, even editing admins.

In that case, this is perfect for now, because I can manage all games/tools from one dashboard and still have separate URLs. Thanks again.

https://github.com/itchio/itch.io/issues/251

Based on the above, I'm going to create an account specifically for showing development progress of the game and discussing the design and implementation decisions. The finished game will be published in my main (eric81766) account.

On having one account edit the details of another (I think this is how to do it)

https://itch.io/docs/api/oauth 

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