One of the worst habits you can have as a game developer is not committing your data or code changes to your main development branch early and often. I have witnessed so many production blottlnecks induced by artists, designers, and even programmers waiting for the last minute to submit their work. And in consequence, causing builds to fail and projects unable to reload after syncing to the latest changes.
In the context of modern CI/CD production processes, this bad habit can be very costly for the entire team. A typical game development team generates a massive amount of highly coupled data, and code changes. So, in consequence, code, as well as data, can break your builds in very subtle ways. The best way to reduce the impact on your deliveries is to test your builds and report regressions as early as possible.
Thus, you must have changes submitted, built, and delivered to your QA several times a day. Especially during the day, when the core team is present and can provide fixes before EOD (end of the day).
My main recommendation to new game developers is to get the habit of submitting your changes to your repo at minimum two times a day. Once before lunchtime and at the latest one hour before leaving the office so you can confirm your changes are building correctly on the build system.
In other words, never leave the office without making sure your changes are building correctly and never wait to submit completed work during the day. It's always better to fail early than too late.
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