Patch management - best practice

[wirago]

As we are moving towards our first release we are thinking about how to release patches in the best way.
Our game consists of many many files - obviously - but do we have to pack and release the complete .exe file if we make a change in a single .lua file, or is there a better way to distribute small patches / fixes?

[MrFariator]

May not be the best approach, but one idea I thought of while thinking about the same issue was to install patches within the user's save directory for the game. If you set the "appendidentity" field to false in conf.lua or so, love.filesystem will look into the save directory first before the source directory when looking for files. With that in place, all you have to distribute are the patched .lua files in a folder structure that mimics the contents inside the executable you're distributing. Of course, you'd either have to provide an installer or guidelines for users on how to apply the patches this way.

Then again, for smaller games I don't think it's a bad practice to just distribute an updated version of the .exe, particularly with any new customers in mind. If you're releasing the game on something like Steam, it's probably the easier approach, too.