Chapter 6
Editions and release trains
Ship a demo and a console version of the same game without maintaining copies of it, then release everywhere in one step.
4 sections · Chapter 6 of 8
At some point one game becomes several things: the game, a demo for a festival, a Switch version with different textures, a build for a publisher under NDA. The traditional answer is a copy — a separate stream, a separate repository, a folder called MyGame_Demo_FINAL — and the traditional consequence is that the copy drifts, and six months later a fix that landed in the main game never reached the demo anybody is still playing.
An edition is that relationship expressed properly: a permanent downstream line of the game that keeps receiving the main game's work and never sends anything back.
This chapter covers the two shapes an edition takes, how scope decides what an edition even contains, how the main game's work reaches it, and how to ship all of them on the same commit without one store going live hours before another.
In this chapter
- 6.1Demo and platform editionsA permanent downstream copy of your game: changes flow one way, and it never merges back.
- 6.2Scope: what an edition containsInclude and exclude rules decide what is materialized. Content outside the scope never reaches a workspace or a build machine.
- 6.3Integrating from the main gameBring the main game's newer work into an edition. Files the edition owns are parked for a person to decide.
- 6.4Release trainsPin one commit, build every edition from it, and hold every store upload until they are all green.
Summary
An edition is a permanent downstream line of the game — a demo or a platform version — that keeps receiving the main game's work and never merges back. That single constraint is what makes it maintenance-free where a copied repository is not.
Scope is the guarantee worth understanding: excluded content is never materialized, so it cannot leak from a build machine or a contractor's laptop. Ownership is the consequence worth watching: editing a file in an edition stops the main game's changes to it arriving, permanently, which is why the commit bar warns you the first time.
Integration applies everything it can and parks what it cannot, forever, rather than blocking or guessing. And a release train holds every store until every build is green, on one shared commit, with versions still per edition because cert cycles do not care about your schedule.
The next chapter steps back from the daily work to the things you set up once: people, keys, and paying for it.