Devlog #49 - Bugs, Bugs, Bugs…
Oh me oh my, it has come the time for us to be experience the beauties of QA.
Specifically, we’ve been hard at work wrapping up the Kickstarter backer beta build. For the past…I don’t even know how many weeks to be honest, we’ve been solving bugs, fixing soft locks, and tweaking things so it felt like a real game.
You know, sometimes, I still get shocked Snacko is a real game.
Anyways.
🌱 A New Beginning
Quite literally. The first part of the game was one of the first parts we worked on (duh), so I’ve always felt a bit…sussed by it. It wasn’t terrible, but I didn’t like how it threw you into an endless journey of dialogue for the first 15 minutes.
Now, you start off with a relatively short bit of text and straight into the tutorial where you can walk around and get a feel for the gameplay. Although we kept almost 90% of the content originally made for the intro, I’ve shuffled things around a bit and edited some dialogue to set up the rest of the game (in my humble opinion) better.
As I go through the rest of the game’s text to get ready for localization, I’ve been re-re-re-checking to make sure all of the lore and story flows together properly.
‘Cause, you know, I can’t keep my own lore straight.
📖 World Building
Speaking of lore, I’ve also made some small cosmetic changes and swaps to parts of the story. Snacko’s main story has undergone a couple of small changes while keeping pretty close to Mandy’s original plot outline for the game.
These are kind of small things, but they’re really important to me. I hope these small changes and improvements to the story makes the overall experience feel more polished!
💀 Bug Hell
Well, OK, now to the actual bulk of what we’ve been up to. Some of these aren’t even “bugs”, more like features that were never truly finished. One of the confusing bits of the minimap has been the player’s cursor’s direction being ambiguous. Well, now there’s an arrow! So I hope you won’t get lost!!
Real bugs aside, there’s small things from the bookshelf UI not being contained to the window properly, causing it to spill out the sides and become unreadable/unusable if your monitor or window wasn’t a perfect 16:9…
…to bigger bugs like…Nobu falling off the map continuously, banished forever to the Shadow Realm.
All in all, we probably squashed a little over 40 bugs of varying sizes and…intensity. Rest assured, Nobu is now safely in his house instead of falling until the end of time.
Sometimes, to make sure we can easily debug issues, we end up with screenshots like this:
The debug default cobblestone texture wall from the depths of game development hell. Lovely.
Looking back, though, the game is in a much better spot. I’m pretty proud of what we’ve accomplished since August! I think I’m starting to get less anxious about Snacko as a real video game that real people (wow) are going to play!
This is how I feel…
Well, that’s all for this month! Hopefully, we can squish the last of the ugly bugs in the upcoming weeks and run the beta. Ahh, I’m so nervous. Imagine that, people actually playing the video game.
Thanks for reading until the very end! 💌
Extra thank you to our Patrons and Ko-fi supporters! Without you, Snacko development would look very different. We appreciate every one of you 🐾
