Devlog #56 - Bug Season
The weather is warming up, and that’s where all the bugs are coming from! Ahhh! I hate bugs! Of both variety. Sorry if you like bugs. I’m just scared of them.
This devlog is going to be a short one with not many pretty pictures, because we have not done anything pretty.
We’ve been fixing bugs. In fact, it’s been so solely bug fixing that I’m going to have one header for this month…
🐛 Bugs
Yes, bugs.
One of the bigger ones that plagued my mind for days was how localization for Japanese came back with a sheet detailing concerns about repeating lines across different NPCs.
“How is that possible??” I thought. Upon further digging, it almost seemed like the keys (a unique ID assigned to any chunk of text that displays) are all jumbled.
That’s terrible!
I went into a mild panic because that means something went wrong in the export process of all the text, and with how many words the game has (over 100k!) it was a lot to…do.
Luckily, the issue seemed to be something related to the plugin we used for our dialogue trees. Outside of “Save”, “Save All”, and “Save As”, there was also a plugin specific action: “Save All Dialogue”.
Yup, you guessed it. We had to press that button for the engine to regenerate and apply keys to all the texts keys. Which we haven’t, because I pressed “Save All” in the regular menu and assumed it was the same.
Read the wiki and documentation people! People is me.
This sort of took up a whole week of scrambling and some 3AM emails, but now we’re on track! I think!
Bonus image: localization team confused by my terrible jokes.
That one solved, I also spent a day on one of the long-standing Snacko bugs: blue tint when you move between levels during day time.
You’re gonna love this one.
Essentially, we noticed two years ago that when you move between levels, like the town and Nobu’s house for example, the game would get ugly blue tinted.
After multiple attempts over the past 24 months, I have finally figured it out after an afternoon of piece-by-piece dismantling of Snacko’s lighting and weather system:
The fog I chose was too blue.
I repeat, the fog I chose was just simply too blue, causing the game to be blue.
What was happening, was that the fog color that you can see in the world was changing properly, but the way the fog affects the sunlight etc. was not being updated until you swap levels. This is what I assume to either be an engine bug or a limitation of the half dynamic half stationary lighting system.
So in the above example, you can see the fog in the distance being green, but the world is not covered with a sickly green YET. When you switch levels, it updates the world to reflect how the lighting would be if there was green fog everywhere.
So yeah, I fixed the “too blue” bug by making the fog color “less blue”.
I love video games with all my heart.
The rest of the bugs we fixed are too boring to recount. If I told you about the bugs I fixed you would close this window and go do something better with your time, like eat dirt.
So I will spare you the details and end the devlog here.
Thank you for reading all the way to the end! <333
Extra thank you to our Patrons and Ko-fi supporters! Without you, Snacko development would look very different. We appreciate every one of you 🐾
