When testing for the known

Aug 21, 2018 by Markus Törnqvist

Hi again!

It seems we are not immune to a very specific bad habit in software engineering: testing for the known. We received some bug reports quite fast - and we thank you for them - which we should have caught.

Entering the UFO appeared buggy, because we had accidentally left the whole object interactable, even if the action menu should open only at the door.

You are also advised that the game may not load pre-1.0.0 autosaves correctly if you hit continue in the menu. This is because the open-source Escoria framework we use isn’t particularly stable. I noticed that characters could be set to a negative angle. As such this isn’t a big deal; you can rotate however many degrees you want and always end up somewhere. From a development point of view, dealing with negative degrees just doesn’t make sense. Some internal changes were also made, which will break old saves.

The third bug was after finishing the game. You could hit Continue or New Game and have everything go dark, except the player character. Escoria’s game_over() code looked too heavy to deal with during the original jam development. It took a while to figure out, but it’s figured out now. You can’t continue after finishing the game and a new game shouldn’t be buggy anymore.

We must be more mindful of these types of issues in the future. It’s easy to miss them, because running a pre-revenue games studio means juggling napalm-covered bowling balls and pins all the time. Then there’s the delays between our development of the framework and having our changes integrated. If they’re going in at all.

I’ve heard it said that shame is a sign of a healthy man, but so is releasing 1.0.1!

To end on a positive note, these are things that will make it into Iron Sky: Cold War, so we don’t have to fight the same bugs again.