Devlog #57 - Bug Season (S2)

Hello, Snacko readers! Welcome to Season Two of “Bugs - Please Go Away!” I’m your host, enralis, and I’m here to tell you how it’s…

Yeah, we’re still fixing the video game.

I mean, I could just ramble about all the specifics about the things we’ve fixed but I’ll just cover the gist of it. This will be a short one and I apologize in advance for very little pretty pictures.

To make up for that, here’s a bug where some desert rocks are floating in the Grassy Plains. Why are they there???

🥰 Likes & Dislikes

So, I lied, ‘cause this isn’t a bug. When we went into QA, one of the issues was trying to give Mikan an Egg on Toast would crash the game. The bug was actually…the NPCs never had their likes and dislikes entered into the database.

Yeah, my bad. So I had to go do that.

Also, I didn’t put in the proper recipe data for some dishes. So Mikan would teach you how to cook something, and if you followed her instructions, you got…this.

Luckily, 80 years ago, recursive already wrote the system for defining and setting this data, and it was super intuitive and easy to use!

Hardcore weirdo fans will remember (sorry you’re not weird I’m joking) that we have an internal tool: SnackoEd. It’s like a web interface to edit backend data.

Using SnackoEd, I could choose specific items (like Softwood) or items that have an attribute (like Fish, or Sweet Food). It’s pretty cool!

💀 Domino Effect

But with foresight also comes the other end, finding bugs and trying to fix them, only to find out the downstream effects break something else, so a workaround or change had to be implemented.

In this particular case we had, it was an issue where you can softlock yourself by going back to your house in the middle of a story cutscene and sleeping, breaking the video game. To prevent this, we made it so that you can’t sleep or save during a cutscene. Easy? Right?? NO!

Because we have two cutscenes that require you to sleep. And for story/ease of managing the flow/localization team will cry/our producer will actually cry, we can’t change the way it plays out.

So recursive had to go in and add another checkbox that you can check to say, “okay, for this specific cutscene, you can save”.

Kinda frustrating that the closer we are to finishing the game, the better all our custom systems and tools get. It’s like, okay wow…sure would’ve been nice if we had this at the start!!

Such is life.

🎮 What’s That Button?!

I’m not a very honest person. Actually, my memory is just bad. ‘Cause this isn’t a bug, either. In fact, I barely talked about bugs this devlog.

Anyways, you know how every console and their pet hamster has a different gamepad button setup? Right, so, I forgot that the three main controllers that are used (Switch, XBox, PlayStation) are ALL different and NONE of them want to call the shoulder buttons the same thing. Or anything, for that matter.

125 items! Just for gamepad! Ahhhh!!!?????

For each controller button, I had to make a light and dark version (different UI screens will pick different ones to show up better) of every variation. Is this the L2 trigger? NO! You’re a clown! This is the Switch! It’s called ZL!!

🐛 Bug (Real)

Well, to stay true to the title, I will show one bug.

One day, we got a worrying report: when villagers reply to a listing, they should also include the crafting blueprint for the house they’re requesting to live in.

Only fair, right? If you’re going to make me build you a specific house, you better tell me how to make it!!

Anyways. The bug was that you weren’t getting the crafting recipes. How could this be? The game is broken! Oh no!

So, I sit down, prepared for a long day of debugging when…

Oh.

I’m creating the blueprint for the house.

But I never put in the code to add it to the player’s inventory.

Anyways, yeah that’s all for this month. Thank you for reading until the end and sticking with us!

We’ll be working hard to squash these bugs!

Not all of them are caused by my incompetence, promise! Pinky swear!!

Extra thank you to our Patrons and Ko-fi supporters! Without you, Snacko development would look very different. We appreciate every one of you 🐾