I’ve been trying to be better about documenting in-house game dev processes, especially technical art workflows. They tend to contain many, many discrete steps between different programs and are very easy to forget. As the company grows I find documentation becoming more and more valuable.
Trouble is, so far I’ve been just making random Google documents for these processes. This… is not ideal.
- Over-reliance on Google
- Terrible formatting / no interlinking documents
- More or less non-portable
- People forget to read them, or have no idea documentation even exists
I think I’d like to try my hand at building a website to handle the documentation. There are a number of services I could use of course, but generally I’d like to avoid anything that requires a sign-up for rug-pull reasons. Let’s see what we got.
- Just use Hugo bro
- Yeah, theoretically, Hugo would work just fine. Markdown is an excellent way to create pages, and I could build functionality into the site myself. Users could make and edit .md files and submit them using P4, which we already use for Unreal.
- First problem I see is the static nature of Hugo. If a user submits a new .md file, who is gonna build the site? I could go all the way and set up some sort of auto build solutions. Jenkins, or whatever? Gets a bit complicated.
- Is there a dynamic version of Hugo? You know, something that auto updates? Hmm.
- Ok, the term is “Continuous Deployment”, essentially building and deploying the site whenever a Git hook is triggered. https://www.devonmorris.dev/posts/hugo-cd/#fn:1 Looks pretty straight forward - could this work with P4?
- Getting a vps to read P4 events could be way out of scope… or maybe not so bad. -Ok, uh, apparently there is a first party p4 - git connector???
- Technically, the docs could be 100% local lol.
- https://github.com/docmd-io/docmd
- Seems… straightforward?
Still more challenges
- Getting the peeps to write in markdown may be a bit much. Getting them to use git is out of the question.
Just a good ol fashioned github page could work, but needs a login for editing.