Wednesday, July 22, 2015

All the little bugs...

The bug squashing process for The Shattered War continues slowly but surely.  I feel I'm coming very close to having all the "show stopping bugs" ironed out by now. I thought I had them all ironed out of of my playthrough last night, only to come across a new one I hadn't encountered before. It does feel like getting the remaining voice acting is quickly becoming the last major hurdle I will have to overcome before release.

In order to expedite the testing process, I actually created an entirely new "debug area" that allows me to quickly set a whole bunch of choices in main and side quests so that I can jump ahead to different parts in the story rather than having to repeatedly play through the parts of the mod that as far as I can tell are bug free. While it felt weird to be putting in a bunch of effort to create content that would only be used for testing, it has definitely saved me time already, and will only make it easier to test out all the different ending possibilities and ensure that they are tested as much as I can feasibly test on my own.

In my playtesting I have noticed a few common threads in the types of "bugs" that I've been noticing lately. People not appearing in the correct places in a dialogue/cutscene, cameras being too close, plot markers on people or quests journals not updating appropriately. These are all small things that aren't necessarily show-stoppers that make the game unfinishable, but they are definitely quality issues that I don't want to see in the final product that I make available for players.

The only major headache for me at the moment that is really frustrating is that one of the party companions is for some reason not picked up correctly by the game's levelling logic. Specifically, this character does not show any skills in their skills page, meaning that the player is unable to assign skill points (i.e. tactics, herbalism, traps, etc) and thus it always appears as though he needs to be levelled up. This is definitely the most frustrating and disheartening ongoing bug that I've currently been unable to fix - all the other companions I have work perfectly, and I can see no significant differences in their configuration to his.