This feature is a little bit of a strange one as it is covering work I did on the background deployment infrastructure rather than my Soul Invictus itself. There were three main goals to this feature:
- Provide a consistent means to build the system across windows and mac, with as little human input as possible
- To automatically publish to steam, as managing builds on steam can be a bit of a headache sometimes
- Explore DevOps pipelines and specifically Azure DevOps’ functionality
- Stretch goal: to automatically increment the game version based on branch and tag of git in an expanded git build form and display this in game using the player settings.
An example of a build pipeline being run on Azure DevOps. It completes with steam scripts and artifacts being published to the release pipeline. 
The entry points to kick off different builds and set the game version. 
The basic code to construct a custom build, note the game version method at the bottom that pulls the version id from args and adds it to the player settings.
For the stretch goal I wanted to use a build number convention similar to the Gitlab Flow convention. I plumped for a system A.B.CaZ where A, B, and C correspond to the builds major, test public, test development branches and aZ corresponds to a letter to indicate major development feature or task and an automatically incremented commit number Z.
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