I'm getting close to completing an Alpha release of my game and want to know the best way to manage this release with GitHub. I use GH mainly to backup my project - I don't use (nor do I know much about) branching, and commit everything to Main. The Alpha release will have some things that I don't want in the Main codebase. E.g., I'll be converting arrays to base64 for security and will be deleting the array files from the project. I'll also be exporting the project and want to store the exported files in GH.
What's the best way to do this with GitHub? My thought was to create a branch for the release with release-specific changes, but don't merge it into the main codebase. That way I can go back to it in the future, which I'm sure I will need to. Will this work and/or is there a better way?
Thanks, and any other thoughts on releasing w/ GH would be much appreciated.