Quite the opposite! It’s eligible providing it hasn’t been released, and by released I mean finished and published to the masses.
If your game is still in development and sat on a GitHub server, publicly available to anyone who knows that it’s there, then this is fine to enter it.
Have a look at the updated rules I’ve just shared in the new post (link above) and let me know if you feel that any of the rules seem to indicate otherwise. I don’t want people feeling they can’t enter when they can.
Strictly speaking, it’s not. But I think most people new to source control will start with a website like Github. It’s how I started. I know for A Roiling Original, I didn’t even commit any source for a while. I just wrote up issue reports. Then slowly I started making commits saying “This fixes issue #X” and so forth. Having that interface helped me get my feet wet, and looking back, if I’d paid attention, I’d have been able to learn even quicker.
I misunderstood the original question as Why Source Control At All
For instance, if I am trying to fix a bug, I can, before committing a change to source control, see what source I changed. I can make sure I didn’t add in any debug code the player didn’t see.
I also really like being able to see how often I’ve made commits. It’s a non-emotional, nonjudgemental way to say “OK, this is how much you’ve done lately” or “you haven’t committed anything for 2 weeks.”
On the flip side, even small commits boost my morale, e.g. finding a response to a default verb.
Source control is definitely not necessary. Backups such as you mention are great practice.
But source control allows for that and so much more, with potentially less work once you learn it. It allows you to try that odd feature without having much penalty if you need to back out or delay your code change or whatever. And it allows you to go back to a previous version if need be.
To me the best part was finding I didn’t have to know a ton of commands: just “add” and “commit” did so much. With “reset” if I made mistakes. For the rest, I just searched on stackoverflow.com. I was amazed how many people had the same questions as I did.
This is a tangent from the actual rules, and it’s something I’d like to discuss more if anyone is interested. I’m tempted to split this off into its own topic elsewhere so as not to derail things.
I understand the reason for using a Git repository. If using Linux, it is an easy install and your source code is available for anyone to see. I would rather keep my source private until the game is released.
If you are using collaborators, it makes more sense but I would still want the code to be restricted access.
