🌿 Post #5: Branching and Deployment Strategy for Simulation Teams

Genesis of Infrastructure — Entry #5
By Emergent Dynamics, building Colonies: Genesis of E.D.E.N.

---

You’ve got CI.
You’ve got tests.
You’re logging behavior and tracking performance.

But what happens when you start working on multiple features at once?
What happens when a bugfix needs to ship now, but the main branch is mid-refactor?

You need a structured flow.

---

🧭 What This Post Covers

• Clean, professional branching strategies
• How to isolate feature work, hotfixes, experiments
• Tagging and versioning builds
• Deploying builds for test, dev, or release

---

🌱 The Core Idea: Branches Represent Stages of Work

Here’s a battle-tested structure:

main         → Stable, deployable production branch
develop      → Integrates completed features, ready for staging/testing
feature/*    → Individual features or experiments (e.g. feature/orbital-editor)
hotfix/*     → Urgent patches (e.g. hotfix/tile-mesh-flicker)

✅ Your CI should run tests on every branch.
🚀 Production builds only deploy from main.

---

🛠 Branch Example Workflow

You want to add a Wind Vector overlay system.

1. Create a branch:
   git checkout -b feature/wind-vector-overlay
2. Commit regularly with clear messages:

• feat: add WindVector to GeodesicTile
• perf: optimize neighbor vector cache

1. When done, open a Pull Request into develop
2. CI runs all tests automatically
   ✅ Green = merge approved
   ❌ Red = fix or request changes

---

🔖 Tagging and Versioning

Each time main is updated, tag it:

git tag -a v0.3.1 -m "First working orbital visualization"
git push origin v0.3.1

These tags:

• Help identify when regressions were introduced
• Allow rollbacks to known-good builds
• Can be tied to downloadable artifacts or releases

---

📦 Optional: Deployment Targets

If you want live builds per branch:

• Use game-ci/unity-builder to export builds
• Upload ZIPs as GitHub release artifacts or host them on your site
• You can automate:
• develop → dev builds
• main → stable builds

---

🧠 Why It Matters for Colonies

Colonies: Genesis of E.D.E.N. is a modular, layered simulation.
You will constantly be working on:

• Time systems
• Planetary overlays
• Capability lifecycles
• UI and visualization

Without structure, changes will conflict, overwrite, regress.
With branching + CI, you build fearlessly and merge safely.

---

🧭 Summary

✅ Use main, develop, feature/*, and hotfix/*
✅ Require passing tests before merges
✅ Tag releases for visibility and rollback
✅ Automate dev/staging/release builds
✅ Sleep easier knowing it won’t all break when you tweak a float

---

⏭️ Next Entry: Structuring Your Simulation as Modular Namespaces

Now that the repo flows, let’s make sure the code does too.
In Post #6, we’ll explore how modular folder structure and clear namespaces support scalability and emergent system growth.