You might think, with over a month delay on blogging, that I am not making huge progress on games. That would be false! In fact, what I have done is switched gears to the project I
should be getting done: Broken Build Simulator. And I have done a lot. Well, relatively. A lot for me.
One thing that's been happening with this game is that with the scripting system, there are a lot of really crazy bugs that are super hard to debug, because they are being triggered by scripts within scripts within scripts, so it's not as simple as if it were in normal code - I could just pause the game and check the variables, but who knows what a script might be up to. So lots of really weird things have developed over the many many years of development. To help address this, I created a special level just for testing (which the testers, as expected, instantly wanted as a real mode), called Stress Test:
Unfortunately the screenshot does not do it justice. Maybe the fact that this is 30 seconds into a run, and you can see my currency is already capped at 9999, you can see it's a bit nuts. It is just an insane mass of most of the enemies in the game pouring in continuously, dropping 100x the loot. The worst bugs would always appear deep into a run, crashing the game when you had been playing for a long time, and nearly impossible to replicate since they require such a long time playing before they'd occur. With this, we can start out 'deep in a run' instantly! Everything is crazier than it ever gets normally. I (or mostly SpaceManiac before I even got a chance) have fixed a ton of weird little things within a couple days of creating this. To be fair, SpaceManiac has also been implementing a bunch of error-tracing technology that helps more.
I've also written a few songs, updated all the existing audio logs with nicer sound, and half-completed the Endgame mode which is nothing you need to know about! Truly this build simulator is getting less broken by the day. Oh, and the super cool new title screen is almost done thanks to our super cool title artist named HSB. You can see that when it's all done and the Steam page is updated with it.
