T.O.P DevOps
As Quality Director on my Junior Game Team my main responsibility is making sure the professors can see the progress we have made at the end of the week. Using Jenkins and an old desktop. Designers and Professors had access to nightly builds or on demand of the project.
Development Build Verification
Jenkins has the ability to setup multiple jobs configured differently. One of the most helpful jobs for catching bugs is one that runs every time someone pushes to source control. This job is fast and helpful. It is in charge of is compiling the project and letting us know through a Discord bot if anything goes wrong.
Commit Check failure message in our team discord
Automatic Installer Compilation
When it comes around to submission time, taking extra time to compile and test an installer is one of the last thoughts. When triggering a build, the user can toggle an installer to be compiled and artifacted for testing and fallback in worst case scenarios.
First page of the automatically compiled Inno Installer
Nightly Build and Deployment
Another super useful job for everyone on the team is a nightly build. The project is built for shipping, packaged, then deployed to a OneDrive folder accessible by the whole team. This also helps make sure that there is always a working build available to show off. It also sends a Discord message with a change log so everyone on the team can keep up with what is being done in the project.
Nightly Build result notification in our team discord
Lightmap Render Farm
The Server also ran a "Swarm Coordinator" that managed a render farm. This farm was made up of team members laptops that "donated" CPU cores to the farm. This decreased our Lighting Artist's lightmap build times 5X with room for a quality increase. This was non invasive as not every CPU core on a team members laptop will be in use. Below is a example of ~50 CPU cores hard at work.
~50 cores from 5 PCs at work building light maps for our lighting artist