Version histories

[VinnyVideo]

When you program games - or other projects - how do you use version numbers? Unless I'm working on a team that has a certain standard for this (and I haven't been on such a team before, even at work), here's what I do:

1.0 is a full release - it's a completely playable game that includes the basic functionality I planned to include, with no known game-breaking bugs.

For each future release, I'll increase the version number by either 0.1 or 0.01, depending on how big the update is and how many updates I anticipate making.

For pre-release demos, the first release is usually 0.1 no matter what. Otherwise, the version number is the project's estimated completion percentage. For example, if I think I'm about 50% done with the game, the version number will be 0.5. When game is nearly complete and I send a demo to my testing folks, it'll have a high number like 0.95.

I won't increase the version number by 1 unless I'm rewriting huge parts of the code or adding a massive amount of new functionality. For that reason, I haven't released a lot of 2.0's over the years.

That's the way I usually do things. Some people handle version numbers in a very different way, though (here's looking at you, Firefox and Chrome).