How do I set an environment or substitution variable via a step in Google Cloud Build?

I never found a way to set an environment variable in one build step that can be read in other steps, but I ended up accomplishing the same effect by building on Konstantin's answer in the following way:

In an early step, I generate and write my date-based tag to a file. The filesystem (/workspace) is retained between steps, and serves as store of my environment variable. Then, in each step that I need to reference that value, I cat that file in place. The trick is to use sh or bash as the entrypoint in each container so that the sub-shell that reads from the file can execute.

Here's an example:

## Set build tag and write to file _TAG
- name: 'ubuntu'
  args: ['bash', '-c', 'date -u +%Y%m%dT%H%M_$SHORT_SHA > _TAG']

...

# Using the _TAG during Docker build:
- name: gcr.io/cloud-builders/docker
entrypoint: sh
args: ['-c', 'docker build -t gcr.io/$PROJECT_ID/image_name:$(cat _TAG) .']

A caveat to note is that if you are doing the bash interpolation in this way within, say, a JSON object or something that requires double quotes, you need the subshell call to never be surrounded by single quotes when executed in the container, only double, which may require escaping the internal double quotes to build the JSON object. Here's an example where I patch the kubernetes config using the _TAG file value to deploy the newly-build image:

- name: gcr.io/cloud-builders/kubectl
entrypoint: bash
args: ['-c', 'gcloud container clusters get-credentials --zone $$CLOUDSDK_COMPUTE_ZONE $$CLOUDSDK_CONTAINER_CLUSTER ; kubectl patch deployment deployment_name -n mynamespace -p "{\"spec\":{\"template\":{\"spec\":{\"containers\":[{\"name\":\"image_name\",\"image\":\"gcr.io/$PROJECT_ID/image_name:$(cat _TAG)\"}]}}}}}"']
env:
- 'CLOUDSDK_COMPUTE_ZONE=us-central1-b'
- 'CLOUDSDK_CONTAINER_CLUSTER=my-google-proj-cluster-name'

- name: gcr.io/cloud-builders/docker
  entrypoint: sh
  args
    - '-c'
    - 'docker build -t gcr.io/$PROJECT_ID/$(date -u +%Y%m%dT%H%M%S_$SHORT_SHA) .'