Phoenopia Remake - 3a - Keep your commits tidy! - Why git is not bulletproof.

2025-02-14

I launched up my project to find that Gail is now stuck in the floor when loading from a save.

I use git version control for this project. For every step of progress I make, I select the important files that have changed, and I group those changes in what’s called a commit. Here’s an example of adding a few lines to make a crate destructible:

With version control, even if you find that something is broken later on, you can search through all the previous changes and find which change caused the problem. If needed, you can undo it.

It’s a very useful system for tracking project history, and you would think that with unlimited undos you can forget about quality, and write sloppy code, or put unrelated file changes into the same commit. And I thought so too. That is, until I had to fix the problem of Gail stuck in the floor.

Using git bisect, I found the commit that introduced this bug. It has the amazing title of “Added bat swinging and hit and hurt boxes. As part of the bat swinging animation, converted Gail’s sprite to use an AnimationPlayer to take advantage of the method call track. Added hp to boxes so they can be damaged. Weapon trail animation does not work”.

This commit keeps track of so many changes that with 1472 added lines, and 145 removed lines I cannot tell why the bug happens or what introduced the bug. The only thing I can say for certain is that the bug is somewhere there.

The following features should have been split across multiple commits:

• Converting Gail’s animations from an AnimatedSprite2D to an AnimationPlayer
• Adding a hitbox to the bat, and tying it to the animation
• Adding hp to boxes

Finally, to all programmers out there:

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you can write messy code, or put multiple features into one commit just because you use git. One day, it will come back to bite you

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