Get Verified: push from your first commit
Make the GitHub repo before you start, push as you build, and ShipGames can prove how long the game took.
Every game shows how long it took to build. Self-reported means the time comes from your commit dates, which anyone can edit. Verified means ShipGames checked those dates against GitHub's own record of when each push arrived, which nobody can edit.
GitHub only starts keeping that record once the repo exists. Work you did before you made the repo, or pushed all at once at the end, has no outside timestamps, and nothing can add them later. So the one thing to get right is the order.
Day one, before you write any code
- Make an empty public repo on GitHub for the game. Its own repo is simplest, but a folder in a bigger repo works: only the commits that touch the game's folder count.
- Clone it, or link your folder to it, and push once.
- Then start building.
While you build
Commit and push as you go, not at the end. Ask your AI to commit and push after each change that works. Or add a git hook so every commit pushes by itself: save these two lines as .git/hooks/post-commit and make the file executable.
#!/bin/sh
git push --quiet origin HEAD >/dev/null 2>&1 &
When you're ready, ship from the repo on Ship a game (paste the repo and the path to the built HTML). Uploaded files carry no outside timestamps, so only games shipped from a public GitHub repo can be Verified.
What ShipGames checks
- The work reached GitHub in at least 3 pushes, and no single push brought more than half the commits.
- The pushes are spread across at least half of the build time, not bunched at the end.
- No commit is dated after GitHub received it.
- Your latest commit was pushed soon after it was made.
- It all happened in the last 90 days, which is as far back as GitHub keeps pushes.
If you miss one, the game says which on its page, and you can keep building: the check runs again after each new build.
Where this comes from
Two of the seven games here are Verified. The other five were built in a plain folder and pushed to GitHub after most of the work was done. They play the same, but their build time will always say Self-reported. Make the repo first.