Git Basics: Do a Peer Review

[hydrolet]

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Why Do a Peer Review Before Accepting a PR?

In collaborative game development (or any coding project), it's important that every change to the project is reviewed before it's added to the main branch. This helps:

• Catch bugs early
• Improve code quality and readability
• Encourage collaboration and learning from each other
• Protect the stability of the project

Requiring peer review before a PR is accepted ensures that:

• At least one other team member agrees the code is ready to merge.
• The team is working together and communicating about the game.

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How to Do a Peer Review in GitHub

✅ Step 1: Open the Pull Request (PR)

1. Go to the GitHub repository.
2. Click on the "Pull requests" tab.
3. Find the PR that needs review and click on it.

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✅ Step 2: Review the Changes

1. Click the "Files changed" tab in the PR.

2. Read through the changes carefully:

   • Is the code clear and readable?
   • Does it follow the project’s structure and naming conventions?
   • Are there bugs, typos, or missing features?
   • Does it do what the title/description says?

3. In Godot projects, resources like scenes (whose filenames end with .tscn) are not designed to be human-readable, so can be hard to review. With experience, or in simple cases, you may be able to understand the effect of a changes by reading the pull request; but you may wish to test the proposed change as well.

Example: In this pull request, the submitter added 3 new files and modified 3 others to implement a new feature. Some of the changes add or modify GDScript source files, which are readable in the browser:

While the parts of the pull request that define a new video settings scene are harder to review since you cannot see the visual result:

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✅ Step 3: Leave Comments

• Click on a specific line of code and click the "+" button to add a comment.

• Be kind, specific, and helpful. For example:

  • ❌ Bad: “This is wrong.”
  • ✅ Better: “This might break the jump mechanic — maybe check the collision logic?”

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✅ Step 4: Approve or Request Changes

Once you've reviewed everything:

1. Click the “Review changes” button (top-right).

2. Write a comment summarising your review.

3. Choose one:

   • Approve – if everything looks good.
   • Request changes – if something needs to be fixed.
   • Comment only – if you just want to leave feedback but not block merging if someone else approves the pull request

4. Click “Submit review.”

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After the Review

• If changes are requested, the author should fix the code and push new commits to the same PR.
• Once all issues are addressed and the PR is approved, a maintainer (or whoever has merge rights) can merge it into the main branch.
  

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Tips for Reviewers

• Be respectful. Reviews are not personal — they’re about making the game better.
• Don’t just focus on problems — point out what’s working well too!
• If you're not sure about something, ask questions instead of making assumptions.

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