I suppose you don’t have a permission to overwrite Ron’s master so you have to change your branch first anyway (not your copy of master, like I did ). Then you create a “pull request” and Ron has to accept it so I don’t think you could ruin the build.
The master branch on Github is not the branch the released version of the game is built from, that is a whole different repo that is not even on Github. If there are pull request for the github branch, I’ll pull them and then merge them into the released games branch.
Yes, it’s complex.
But rest assured any change that makes it into the released game will go though our full QA process.
It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with Git, but with the hosting platform. In this case that’s GitHub, but it’s not substantially different in GitLab, Bitbucket, etc. When you “fork” a repository you can play around with it however you want without affecting the original project, because it’s just a copy.
Through forks GitHub has implemented the pull request/merge request workflow on top of Git. So if you want to share something with someone else, you create a pull request from your branch (which can be your master) to whichever repository you want to share with.
It doesn’t matter, but your life is likely to be slightly easier if you keep master the same as upstream. Otherwise it’s just an extra tax on your brain to remember that something with the same name has diverged.